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Nutritional Anthropology, Volume 24, Number 1

Competing Discourses on the Political Economy of Hunger

By Andrea TimmerUniversity of Iowa

AbstractIn areas in which many of the residents suffer from a lack of food, the way people speak about hunger and malnutrition dictate the action (or lack of action) that will be taken in response to these phenomena. In Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua there are subtle ways in which the thinking concerning hunger of profession-als involved with the malnourished differs from that of the malnourished themselves and their families. Such differences are influential in the perpetuation of hunger and malnutrition. The discourses engaged in by professionals – aid workers, health care providers, and school teachers – do not correspond to the views of people in whose families there are documented cases of malnutrition, and often under-play (in many cases, even ignore) the political econ-omy of hunger. This paper argues that the disjunc-tures that occur in the discourses of hunger take the spotlight off what is the ultimate root of hunger – namely, the neoliberal policies of the Nicaraguan government. [hunger, child malnutrition, neoliberal policies, poverty, Nicaragua]

The Atlantic coast of Nicaragua is a fertile region with abundant natural food resources. It is also a re-gion that is marked by high levels of clinically diag-nosed malnutrition. The paradox that occurs when a hungry and malnourished population exists along-

side sufficient food resources is not unique to this re-gion. Nor is this dichotomy a newly recognized phenomenon. Frances Moore Lappé, author of best-selling Diet for Small Planet (published first in 1971 with subsequent revisions in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2002), has built her career on challenging the myth that hunger is due to worldwide food shortages. In the most recent installment written in collaboration with her daughter, Lappé argues,

For every human being on the planet, the world produces twopounds of grain per day – roughly

Table of Contents

Research Articles Competing Discourses on the Political Economy of Hunger ...................................................... A Comparison of Nutritional Indicators from Bam-bara and Fulani Girls Born in Paris, France and in the Segou Region of Mali.........................Page 13 Social Identity and Food Choice in the Southeast-ern United States ......................................Page 23 Research Reports Evaluation of pastoral livelihood opportunities: a case of West Pokot Disrict........................Page 38

Book Reviews Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health .................................Page 41 Household Decisions, Gender, and Development; A Synthesis of Recent Research............... Page 42

Nutritional Anthropology, Vol. 28, Issues 1-2, ISSN 1548-1735, online ISSN copyright 2006 by the American Anthropology Association. All rights reserved. Send request for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Nutritional Anthropol-ogy

__________________________________________________________________________________________Official Publication of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition

Volume 28, Number 1-2 Spring-Fall 2006

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Nutritional Anthropology, Volume 26, Number 1-2

Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity ...................................................Page 43

President’s Report 2005-06 ...................Page 45Notes from the Editor ............................Page 46Officers of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition

3,000 calories, and that’s without even counting all the beans, pota-toes, nuts, fruits, and vegetables we eat, too. This is clearly enough for all of us to thrive; yet nearly one in six of us still goes hungry (Lappé and Lappé 2002:15).

For many scholars and researchers such as Lappé, hunger and malnutrition are salient categories for study primarily because they cannot be easily attrib-uted to a lack of food; rather, they are more likely due to an inequitable distribution system (J. Robbins 1992; R. Robbins 1999; Sanchez 2002).

In this paper, I am particularly interested in an as-pect of this phenomenon that I feel has been ad-dressed inadequately in contemporary literature: namely, the discourses of hunger and malnutrition engaged in by those who are most affected either be-cause they themselves are suffering from malnutri-tion or because they are in contact with the malnour-ished in their daily work as aid workers or health care providers. These discourses emerge among the affected in efforts to explain how and why hunger occurs and serve to dictate the action (or lack of ac-tion) that will be undertaken to combat hunger and malnutrition. In Puerto Cabezas, a city located on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, the discourses that emerged in my research as most significant were those of aid workers, health care providers, and school teachers that 1) did not correspond to the views of people in whose families there are docu-mented cases of malnutrition, and 2) underplayed (in many cases, even ignored) the political economy of hunger. In this paper, I demonstrate that there are subtle differences in the ways that professionals in-volved with the malnourished think compared to mothers and/ or families of the malnourished that may be influential in the perpetuation of hunger. I also highlight the ways that the competition between the maternal and professional discourses takes atten-tion away from what I deem the ultimate root of hunger – namely, the neoliberal politics of the Nicaraguan government.

Methodologies

I conducted research in the city of Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua over the course of six weeks in the sum-mer of 2002. During my stay, I lived with two sur-geons, Jorge1 and Pamela, who were from Managua and were working on the Atlantic coast to fulfill the two years of community service required of doctors and surgeons. I was initially affiliated with the Nicaraguan Children’s Fund (NCF), a non-govern-mental organization (NGO) based in the United States. My affiliation with this organization was in-fluential in establishing contacts, and allowed me greater ease in gaining access to governmental offi-cials, health care workers, and mothers.

My goal in Puerto Cabezas was to determine the in-cidence of malnutrition among children and to ex-amine and explore the conceptualizations and per-ceptions of hunger formulated by all those involved with childhood malnutrition and hunger. To this end I conducted 58 semi-structured and unstructured in-terviews with three distinct groups of individuals. I conceptualized these groups as existing in concentric circles (Figure 1) according to their distance from the problem of hunger. At the outermost level of the hierarchy, those farthest away from the actual expe-rience of hunger, are NGO workers and government officials. The second group is composed of health care workers and school directors, individuals who work with and are confronted with malnourished children on a daily basis. The third group consists of mothers of malnourished children, most of whom were unemployed or under-employed and unmar-ried. I was concerned with child malnutrition, so questions I posed to the respondents were centered on child health. I asked all interviewees questions about the general health status of children, what foods were currently being eaten in the region, what foods were needed for good health, what the prospects for a feeding program were, and what such a program would include. In addition to these inter-views, I conducted bi-weekly surveys of the local food market in which I made spot checks of the foods that were being bought. Furthermore, I spoke with children and had them free-list what foods they normally ate as well as what foods they found most desirable, foods they identified as ones they liked to eat or as their favorite foods.

Through the interviews I conducted, varying dis-courses of hunger emerged. For the purposes of this

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inquiry, discourse refers to how people speak and exchange ideas as well as dictates the actions that those people will take. In the case of Puerto Cabezas, maternal discourse is often silenced, while that of professionals is favored. Therefore, action that is taken regarding hunger and malnutrition fol-lows the beliefs held by NGO/government workers, health care providers, and schoolteachers. However, as will become clear in the remainder of this paper, mothers are more closely attuned to the underlying causes of malnutrition and the political economy of hunger – the neoliberal policies that foster an envi-ronment of persistent poverty, increasing unemploy-ment, and chronic malnourishment.

Hunger in Puerto Cabezas: “It’s an Economic Problem”

Many individuals I interviewed from all three cate-gories argued that while hunger was important and was indeed a problem, it was not the most severe difficulty that Puerto Cabezans faced. For Margaret who worked in the traditional medicine center at the local college in Puerto Cabezas, “There is definitely a problem, but if we are going to find a solution we have to focus on everything, not just food.” Prob-lems in Puerto Cabezas identified by residents I spoke with include in no specific order: poor trash removal, contaminated water, pollution created by fishing and timber industries, drug abuse, inadequate diet and food supply, prostitution, inclement weather, unemployment, lack of education, mosqui-toes, poor health care, and an uneasy relationship with the central government located in Managua. Hunger was seen as merely one of many problems faced by residents of Puerto Cabezas on a daily ba-sis.

For many, the social problems they faced daily could be attributed completely to poverty or a lack of a vi-able economic base. When asked about hunger specifically many respondents would reply, “It’s an economic problem.” The following excerpts from interviews provide some examples:

Director of Children, Office of the Mayor: The major problems here are economics, unemployment, drugs, prostitution – all problems are economic.

Nurse at public health clinic: Eco-nomic problems are the principal

problems. Parents don’t have money for food.

Aid worker for a NGO: One of the biggest things that leads to hunger is a lack of an economic base for peo-ple here.

Most often such “economic problems” were identi-fied as directly related to high rates of unemploy-ment. In fact, among all three groups there was a consensus that there was a direct relationship be-tween a lack of food and unemployment. Rosa, an unemployed mother of five, took me on a tour of the neighborhood in which she lived where, according to her, the majority of the residents were single, un-employed women with three or more children. She introduced me to Mariana, a young Miskita woman with three children – an 11-year-old son, 4-year-old daughter, and a baby boy who was 1 year and 5 months old. The girl had not yet learned to speak and the baby had been running a fever for several days and had chronic diarrhea. Mariana worked as a cleaning woman, which meant that she cleaned pub-lic buildings in the town such as the church and the school for which the members of the community could choose to pay her a peso. According to Rosa, “If I pay her a peso she can eat. If I don’t pay, she doesn’t eat.”

For unskilled women the only jobs available in the region were domestic work or prostitution. Posi-tions for men included taxi drivers, construction workers, or night watchmen. Women may also be employed as nurses or teachers but these are posi-tions that require a certain amount of education, and very few in Puerto Cabezas go to school for more than three years. People from the Pacific coast most often filled the positions that required more training and education. Jorge held that it was essentially im-possible for someone from Puerto Cabezas to be-come a doctor because the schools were so far be-hind. The curriculum taught in the high schools on the Atlantic coast was the equivalent of the grade school curriculum taught in the Pacific. According to Jorge, those wishing to become doctors would have to go to Managua to be educated.

Those who were employed often were underem-ployed. That is, they did not receive enough money to provide for the basic needs (food, clean water, clothing, shelter). For example, Cora was a domes-tic servant who worked seven days a week from

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seven in the morning until seven at night except on Sundays when she just worked in the morning. She earned approximately 50 dollars a month (700 cór-dobas), and since her husband was unemployed, she was the sole supporter of her family, which con-sisted of seven children ranging in ages from 4 to 18. Cora was paid once a month and by the end of the month there was usually no money left to buy food.

For many families, when the parents could not find jobs the children would have to quit school to find work. Children who did odd jobs on the street such as shining shoes, selling fruit, or carrying bags were known as street children although such a designation did not mean that they necessarily lived on the streets. Many of these children had problems with drugs. They would sniff glue or gasoline to dull their hunger and to make themselves feel stronger. Young girls as early as fourteen would get involved in prostitution. Young boys often left to find work on lobster and fishing boats. Recalling the stories of abuse she has heard related to boys working on these boats, a school director commented with tears in her eyes, “It is not fair to give children such hard labor; it is not fair.”

I befriended two child workers during my stay in Puerto Cabezas. Both worked at the airport. Mateo,15, attended high school in the morning and worked at the airport in the afternoon by carrying passengers’ bags for a few pesos. His greatest desire was a pair of shoes that cost 50 córdobas (approxi-mately 3.50 US dollars). He wore his brother’s shoes when he went to work and wanted a pair of his own so he could work harder and put in more hours. Catalina was 11 and did not go to school. She sold woven boxes and jewelry that her aunt made on the street. During the first week I was in Puerto Cabezas, Catalina came to the house carrying two woven boxes that she was selling. She explained that her aunt was sick and so she had to work all day looking for food because they did not have any. She claimed that her family, which consisted of 15 sib-lings, had no rice or beans, a garden, or fruit trees. Before leaving that night, Catalina asked me for some food which I provided and over the course of my stay she came by often to sell items and to get some food. While I was there, I bought her crackers, a cupcake, Ramen noodles, a sandwich, a quesadilla, and a package of powdered milk.

“They Don’t Know How to Eat”

Catalina’s food choices seemed to correspond with the common notion among aid workers, government officials, health care providers and school teachers that malnourished individuals do not know how to eat right. According to professionals such as Jorge and Pamela people were hungry because of choice they had made.

J – There are many fruits and vegetables that grow here – mangoes, papaya, tomatoes, avocado – and seafood – lobster, shrimp, fish – but people don’t eat them.P – They eat rice and yucca and maybe a little meat, but if that is not available, only rice and yucca.A – Why do you think they don’t eat the other foods that are available?P – Habit.J – Because of their culture. They choose Tang or Coke instead of fresh mango. They eat too much sugar.A – What do you think they need to eat?P– They need to eat a balance of fruits, veg-etables, and meat.

In another conversation Jorge mentions his displeasure for working at the hospital,J – I don’t like working at the hospital be-cause they are lazy. AT – Who is lazy the patients or the…? J – The nurses. They don’t want to work. I think it is because they work from 6 in the morning to 6 at night and they only get paid 100 – not even 100 dollars [per month]. Do you know what is for lunch? Rice. White rice. No vegetables, just rice. And you know what is for breakfast? Black coffee. That’s all.

Jorge recognizes that nurses have low energy be-cause they do not get enough to eat, but equates their low energy with laziness. This judgment is typical of how many professionals characterize the hungry. Among the aid/government workers and health care providers/school teachers there was agreement that malnourished people are malnourished because they

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eat the wrong types of food and were consciously choosing to do so. This type of thinking represents a disjuncture with the thinking of the mothers in two ways. First, mothers report knowing the “right” foods to feed their children. Table 1 shows the foods that mothers reported feeding their children compared to the foods reported by aid/government workers and health care workers as the most nutri-tious for children. The foods are listed according to frequency reported with the foods more often cited at the top of the list. This chart is based on inter-views conducted with 23 mothers and 26 NGO/gov-ernment workers and health care providers. I asked individuals from both groups, “What foods do peo-ple usually eat or what foods do you feed your chil-dren?” and “What foods should children be fed?” The responses listed represent only answers to these two questions. As I was unable to eat with or ob-serve any of these families eat, it is not clear how well the reporting behavior corresponds to actual be-havior. Furthermore, the mothers may have been re-sponding to my question with what they felt they should be feeding their children as many of these in-terviews were conducted at the health clinic. How-ever, this table indicates that the food knowledge the mothers have corresponds closely to that of mem-bers from the other two interview groups. While the two lists are not identical, there are many overlaps. Both groups include beans, rice, fish, meat, yucca, oatmeal, bananas, and eggs although they ascribe to them varying degrees of importance. The only foods listed by mothers without a correlate in the profes-sionals’ list are coffee and coconut.

Second, mothers rarely chose to eat, or to feed to their children, the “wrong” types of food. Rather, they lived in a system in which such foods were of-ten more expensive than Coca-Cola or Ramen noo-dles. Puerto Cabezas, like the plantation economies discussed by George Beckford, is characterized by an

infrastructure for processing and distribution of export crops [that] is highly developed whereas that for domestic output is not. Again, most of the export crops have guaranteed metropolitan markets while peasant production for the domestic markets are forced to compete with cheap foods imported from other countries where farmers are subsidized (1972:28).

Nutritionist Marisela claimed that parents often feed their children Ramen noodles thinking it is best for kids but she would advise that for the same amount of money it takes to buy five quarts, they could buy two eggs. When Marisela imparts this advice, she is not taking into account that the Ramen could feed perhaps up to five times as many people. The first concern for mothers buying food for the family is being able to feed everyone. The second concern is for nutrition.

Vaso de Leche

Another point of disjuncture between mothers and other interview groups was the differing ideas of the importance of drinking a glass of milk each day.2 No mother placed greater importance on milk than any other food (see Table 1). Only four out of 23 mothers reported giving their children milk and only two listed it among the foods that children should consume for adequate nutrition. Among children, only seven out of 87 reported that they drank milk. However, among other groups interviewed un vaso de leche, or a glass of milk every day, was seen as almost a solution to the problem of hunger. Essen-tially every native aid/government worker, health care provider or schoolteacher identified and stressed the importance of a glass of milk a day in promoting health among children.

According to Marisela the principal problem among malnourished children in the region was a lack of protein. She reported encouraging mothers to feed their children beans, eggs, fish, or meat but main-tained that the one nutritional supplement children needed more than any other was milk. She claimed that when a feeding program rationed a glass of milk a day, she could see a difference in the health and well being of children. While having dinner at an outdoor restaurant with Pamela she pointed out the visible local resources – the ocean below us and the fruit trees that sur-rounded us. People have all they need to eat here, she claimed. They just need to supplement it with a glass of milk. Schoolteachers, health care providers, and NGO/government workers all claimed that the best nutrition for the children was a glass of milk each day. In every interview when I asked the ques-tion “What foods should children eat?” the answer always included milk. According to the majority of the professionals with whom I spoke, food programs

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for children if they were to be successful should be centered around un vaso de leche.3

Despite claims that children need to receive a glass of milk a day, I saw very few people actually drink-ing it and, as mentioned above, milk was not an im-portant food item to many of the mothers. Liquid milk was available only in the supermarket, and then only in a limited amount. In the street markets where the majority of those in Puerto Cabezas did their food shopping, only powdered milk was avail-able, and again only in a limited amount. Most stalls primarily sold fruits and vegetables, and powdered milk was sold only in the few stalls that sold a large variety of edible and nonedible items. The cheapest milk cost approximately two U.S. dollars for a liter and, according to Marisela, was not recommended for children to drink. Milk that was suitable for child consumption cost three to four U.S. dollars for a liter. In a region where unemployment and under-employment rates could be as high as 60 to 80 per-cent, milk was unattainable for those families who are thought to benefit most from its nourishment.

When milk was purchased and drunk, it was most often in powdered form, which does not diminish any possible nutritional benefits. Powdered milk and liquid milk have essentially the same nutritional value. However, powdered milk is reconstituted with water that is most likely contaminated. Gov-ernment and aid workers identify contaminated wa-ter as one of the largest environmental problems. Raquel of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARENA) claimed that water is the sec-ond biggest problem after trash removal.4 Accord-ing to Raquel, there is no way of getting rid of agua negra, sewer water. Where there are septic tanks, they are often located right next to the well and therefore the sewer water seeps into the household water supply. Businesses also create problems with the water supply. Large, internationally owned fish-ing and timber businesses are not regulated and therefore continually leak waste into the ocean and into the town’s drinking supply. An American run-ning a fishing business in Puerto Cabezas had the water tested. The water that came from the faucets in his plant tested unsafe for human consumption while the local brand of purified water, Agua Caribe, tested barely suitable.5 Therefore, milk, when drunk, was likely to be a factor in, rather than an inhibitor to, many of the common childhood ill-nesses such as diarrhea and vomiting.

Competing Discourses

Thus far, I have argued in this paper that the differences in the ways in which mothers and professionals in Puerto Cabezas speak about hunger reflect the subtle differences in perceptions of the factors regarding the perpetuation of hunger and malnutrition. In this section, I will present the stories of two women, Marla, a mother of five, and school director Linda, whose narratives will provide further insights into the points of divergence and convergence in conceptualizations of hunger among the various groups of individuals.

Marla’s StoryI met Marla the last day I was in Puerto Cabezas. From the rocking chair on her porch she smiled broadly to welcome me as her mother motioned for me to sit down. She seemed to know immediately why I was there. Before I had a chance to ask any questions she announced in a mixture of Spanish and English, “I have five kids. Five es mucho. I don’t want many. Very difficult to have many childs. Much trouble.” She went on to tell me that she could not work because she was sick and it was, “Too much problem. No office work for me.” She laughed with this last remark and motioned to two of her children who were making bread. The two girls stood under a shelter as they transferred mounds of dough onto a flat cooking surface that was set up over an open fire. Marla explained to me that the bread was the family’s only source of income, but that when it rained they could not bake bread. With a laugh, Marla professed that she had no luck; she had no cocaine. Cocaine is very lucky, she says. Those with cocaine live well and people with no cocaine live poorly.6

There is not enough food, she told me. “No hay money. No hay nothing. Rice and beans. Rice and beans,” she lamented. She claimed that her family ate once a day and that day they had eaten beans and bread in the morning. While I was there, the children shook some mangoes down from a tree and handed me one. Marla commented that things were harder when there were no mangoes.

Marla’s situation was different from most others with whom I had spoken. She had been educated at a university in Managua and returned to Puerto Cabezas to find work but had been unsuccessful. She was living with her mother since a heavy rain had damaged her own home. Her children attended

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school in the neighborhood, but she was not able to buy them uniforms and supplies. She attributed the lack of food in her family to larger economic problems. There were no jobs to be had. Even aid money went to people without need; the poor never received any help. She complained that there was no money for medicines. “Doctors can give a prescription but no one can buy anything. There are no vitamins. Many people are sick and there is no money.” Even though she could identify the problem, she saw little relief for her situation. Before I left, she commented, “I think God exists, but it is difficult to believe.”

Linda’s StoryLinda was the director of one of the two schools located in the poorest neighborhood of Puerto Cabezas. For her, the major obstacles she had to overcome in the school were a lack of materials for the children and teachers, insufficient food resources for children, and health problems due to a lack of food and the mosquitoes. According to Linda, there were high levels of malnutrition among her students. Several of the students had fainted on occasion because they had not received enough to eat, and many kids left school because they did not have food – they were either too sick with symptoms of malnutrition or they had to look for work on the streets.

Linda kept some córdobas in her desk and would give students a little money when they asked, but she desired a feeding program within her school that would provide children with a glass of milk. When she heard that a group from Europe was initiating a feeding program, she solicited a letter to have her school included but Corazón del Muey was declined. She now wishes for a program that would provide children with milk during recess. It would give them something to get them through the day and would entice children to go to school and allow them to stay in school. One of her overall goals as director was to keep children in school. Often the students would have to leave to work on the streets where, as Linda explained, they would become involved in drugs. “When they leave, I tell them to take care of themselves and stay away from the kids who are sniffing glue, but I can only give advice.”

Marla and Linda present similar stories. Both are telling stories of poverty and hunger, but the subtle differences in each narrative point to the lack of concordance between the mothers of malnourished

children and other groups of individuals. For Linda, one of the most important goals needs to be finding a way to keep children in school. She feels that with education, a child will be better able to find employment and will not be drawn into the world of drugs and prostitution. Marla also places a great deal of significance on education, but is aware that an education may not necessarily lead to employment. The jobs are simply not there, and until there are more positions available, education is simply a way to prepare her children for what may lie ahead.

Linda also stresses a glass of milk a day for children. For Marla, there is no one food that can solve her problems. Her children have rice, beans, mangoes, and bread to eat and these foods offer a substantial amount of nutrition. However, without a steady income and stable economic base she cannot consistently procure and provide adequate quantities of these foods, and therefore food shortages persist within her family.

For Linda a feasible solution would be a feeding program in the schools. For a family such as Marla’s, such a program may provide temporary re-lief but not a permanent solution. There have been feeding programs implemented in many schools around Puerto Cabezas in the past, and while teach-ers, aid workers, and health care workers have no-ticed the difference that they have made, none have lasted because there is no stable financial base. The programs are not economically viable because when funding runs out, there are no additional pools from which to draw. While I was in Puerto Cabezas, no public schools had any type of feeding program or offered any type of food. A government run day care center offered children lunch and dinner, but the parents were required to pay 70 to 100 córdobas a month, depending on their ability. While this is the equivalent to a few U.S. dollars, for parents with many children and no form of income, this was not a practical solution. Private schools also offered snacks during the day, but again, parents were re-quired to pay tuition for their children to attend these schools.

Perhaps the most telling difference is that although Marla may not identify the specific governmental policies that have contributed to the perpetuation of poverty and hunger, she is aware that a dramatic change in her economic and nutritional status would require transformations made at the societal, rather

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than on the individual, level. Conversely, while Linda recognizes the role poverty plays in the con-tinuation of hunger and malnutrition, she maintains that programs and actions undertaken at the local level can affect change, thus effectively ignoring the political economy of hunger.

The Pacific and Atlantic Coasts: An Inequitable Relationship

The disagreements that occur between the maternal and professional discourse lead to a failure to combat hunger and in fact are instrumental in its perpetuation because the actions of professionals fail to address the problems as seen by the mothers of malnourished children. I further argue, however, that the discrepancies between the two discourses obscure what is the most prominent causal factor of hunger and malnutrition as experienced in the region – the neoliberal policies enacted by the Nicaraguan government. The Atlantic coast has been especially impacted by these policies. Indeed, the roots of hunger can to some extent be traced to the relationship between the two coasts. The two coasts of Nicaragua must be viewed as two discontinuous regions. The region of the Atlantic coast covers half of the national territory and is di-vided from the Pacific coast by a mountainous area in the center of the country. The Atlantic coast, also known as the Caribbean lowlands, is composed of hot, humid, tropical rainforests, swamps, and savan-nahs (Walker 1986:2) and is sparsely populated with only 10 percent of the country’s population residing in the region as of the late 1980’s (Sollis 1989:482). Transportation between the two coasts is limited. There is only one road that connects the two coasts, but it is unpaved and floods easily during the rainy season. The Footsteps travel guide to the region warns, “Puerto is connected by road to Managua; however, the 559-km trip should only be attempted in the dry season, if at all, and in a 4WD vehicle with double spares” (Leonardi 2001:254). Planes travel between the two locations three times a day but the cost of travel is too expensive for most resi-dents of Puerto Cabezas.

The Spanish colonized the Pacific coast of Nicaragua in 1524. The Atlantic coast, on the other hand, was in the control of the British during this period. The British relinquished control of the coast

to Spain in 1787, but the Miskitus, the dominant group at this time, effectively resisted Spanish control and remained loyal to the English until 1894 when President José Santos Zelaya sent troops into Bluefields, a city in the south of the Atlantic Coast, to forcibly expel the English from the region (Hale 1994:39). When the territory was firmly in the hands of the Nicaraguan government (by this time based in Managua), the indigenous inhabitants were obligated to sign an agreement “known in the Pacific as reincorporación and in the coast as an overthrow” (Butler 1997:220). Stipulated in the agreement, Pacific officials were to assume local administrative posts, Spanish was decreed the official language, and the region’s abundant natural resources fell under Pacific control (ibid). “State officials imposed taxes, usurped Indian lands, established local structures of political rule, and imposed strict prohibitions on education and languages other than Spanish” (Hale 1994:46).

For 43 years of the twentieth century, Nicaragua was under the control of the Somoza military dictatorship. Opponents of the Somoza dictatorship were inspired by Liberal leader Sandino and the Cuban Revolution to form the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in 1961. The FSLN rose up against the Somoza dictatorship in 1978 and successfully overthrew the government in July of 1979. Judy Butler writes that the FSLN overthrow was met with “cautious enthusiasm” in the Atlantic coast as the Sandinista program included a section devoted specifically to the coast. According to Butler, “In the first year and one-half, the new government invested more per capita on the coast than in the rest of Nicaragua…” (1997:221). However, Sandinista plans regarding the Atlantic coast were implemented in Managua and did not take into account the specific socio-cultural differences of the region. In the early 1980’s, the Sandinista government successfully put through many policies that at their outset proved beneficial for the country, but the FSLN era of policy enactment was short lived. The United States government under then president Ronald Reagan opposed the socialist government, and throughout the majority of the 1980’s the entire country was engaged in the United States sponsored Contra War that did not end until the election of Nicaraguan Opposition Union party candidate Violeta Chamorro in 1990.

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Despite events that have incorporated the two coasts, the peoples of the Atlantic Coast remain ethnically and culturally distinct from their neighbors to the west. The Pacific coast is often characterized ethnically and culturally homogenous in comparison to the Atlantic.7 The Atlantic coast is populated by three indigenous groups – the Miskitu, Suma, and Rama – and two African based Creole groups – migrants from nearby Caribbean nations and descendants of original slave populations brought to the region by the British as well a significant mestizo population. In addition, the regions remain incongruous with the Atlantic coast maintaining a subordinate role to the Pacific coast. In 1987, the two coasts became officially distinct when the Atlantic coast was declared autonomous and the Región Autonoma Atlántico Norte (RAAN) and Región Autonoma Atlántico Sur (RAAS) were formed (Sollis 1989:515). These two regions, however, should not be considered truly autonomous. Both the RAAN and the RAAS are dependent on the central government in Managua for support and recognition. This relationship is best exemplified by the strike that occurred on the Atlantic coast during my stay there.

One morning I went to the school where I had an ap-pointment only to find that the school was closed be-cause the political parties were fighting, and all gov-ernment workers were on strike. I later learned that there had been political tensions in the area since the regional election of May 4th when the governing body in Managua did not accept the victory of the Sandanista party and refused to acknowledge the re-sults of the election. No money had been sent to the newly elected government and on June 17th a general strike was initiated in order to put pressure on the national government. For approximately a week, schools, aid organizations, and government offices as well as the airport and bus station were closed. Even the hospital and free clinic were open for emergencies only and were seeing no patients.

Most people I talked with, however, were not greatly concerned. Since the majority of the residents were employed in the informal economy – washing clothes, selling food in the marketplace, selling items on the street – they continued to work throughout the strike and saw little to no change in their daily routine save the continual sounds of bottle rockets being fired over the city. The story did not reach any of the major newswires in the U.S. and the strike itself ended abruptly and quietly.

The strike provides insight into the relationship between the two coasts. There are separate governmental structures but the Atlantic coast is dependent on the Pacific for financial support. The elected government could not operate without the money withheld by the government on the Pacific coast. Furthermore, it may also be assumed by the results of the May 4th election that governmental structures and decision are dependent upon approval from the Managua-based government as well.

The ramifications of the Atlantic coast’s dependence can be seen in the inequitable food transport system. The Atlantic coast is an area with plentiful natural food resources. Mangoes, coconut, bananas, yucca, potatoes, rice, and beans all grow naturally in the re-gion, and the ocean provides fish, shellfish, lobster and turtle (illegal to export but still hunted and eaten by Miskitu peoples). The region provides a great enough quantity and diversity for all to have a bal-anced diet. However, as stated earlier, there are still many people who are malnourished. During a one-week period in May, 2002, 57 children were sent to the nutritionist at the public health clinic when a nurse suspected they might be malnourished. Of this number, 47 were determined to have some form of malnutrition. In 2001, 343 children less than one year of age and 555 children between the ages of 1 and 5 were classified as malnourished. Furthermore, children are not the only ones who are suffering. A maternal health care doctor estimated that 15 percent of the pregnant women who came to his private clinic and 30 percent whom he saw at the public clinic were malnourished.

Many of the natural resources Nicaragua boasts are produced on the Atlantic coast. They are grown and harvested mostly in the fincas (privately owned corporate farms). The food that is produced in these fincas is shipped to Managua and from there it was sent to the United States, Europe, and other Latin American countries with which Nicaragua has trade relations. Some food products are also sold back to the Atlantic Coast so that producers are buying back the same foodstuffs they had grown and harvested at a greatly inflated price. Most of the vendors I spoke with sold food that had come from Managua. One avocado vendor I interviewed claimed that the avocados he sold from local corporate farms (fincas) were always shipped to Managua before coming to Puerto Cabezas. While I was there, the only

9


products grown and sold on the Atlantic coast were bananas, nance (a small yellow fruit), and yucca.

Malnutrition persists because the food that is grown on the Atlantic coast is sent to Managua and is not first used to provide subsistence needs of the local population. The doctor of a free clinic located in Bilwaskarmen, a small town near the northern bor-der, explained the circumstances to me. For exam-ple, she said, last year was a good bean harvest, and as the farmers were harvesting the crops, trucks from Managua came to buy all the beans. Farmers sell 100 pounds of beans for 150 córdobas (approxi-mately ten dollars). Following the harvest beans cost nine córdobas per pound in the local market and 12 córdobas in Puerto Cabezas. This represents a 500 percent increase in price for the landowners, and is even more costly for the growers of the product.Export-oriented Economics

There are currently no structures in place that would allow Puerto Cabezas to manufacture and export its own goods, and until such structures are in place, the region will maintain its dependence on the Pacific coast. There is no international airport on the Atlantic coast. The airport located in the city flies only to Managua in the east and Bluefields and Corn Island in the southern area of the Atlantic. John, a fisherman from Arizona, had come to Puerto Cabezas because the shellfish and lobster industry had become so large he saw a niche to fill in the fin fish industry. When I met him, he had been living on the coast for eleven years, and claimed that he was not going to leave until he got “his big bag of money.”8 According to John, “they’ve been promising to build an international airport since day one,” but as it was, he had to ship everything to Managua and then to Miami thus paying double for transport costs. As the Atlantic coast has no systems in place to handle exports, it has been especially hard hit by export-oriented economics, a practice that has been a goal of the current administration as it was for both the Sandinista regime and the Somoza dictatorship, although trade endeavors were approached somewhat differently by the socialist government.

An export-oriented approach to economics often serves to increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country, but can and does severely and negatively impact those who are already living in impoverished conditions, as can be seen in Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Many of the nutrient-

rich foods produced in the region are exported. The agricultural sector (farming, livestock, fisheries, and forestry) is the primary growth sector accounting for “27.5 percent of Nicaragua’s GDP, over 55 percent of the exports, and 60 percent of labor generation in 2000” (U.S. Commercial Service 2002:5). Key agricultural commodities which are now being exported include bananas, beef, cotton, corn, rice, sugarcane, and seafood products such as fish, shrimp, and lobster (Merrill 1993). Foods that are imported into the country are usually too expensive to purchase or are low in nutritional value. Imported agricultural products include wheat, rice, vegetable oils, tallow, and high value consumer-oriented products. By far, U.S. exports of consumer-oriented products including snacks, breakfast cereals, spices, juices, and processed foods exceed all other imported goods reaching a total of $20.3 million in value in 2000 alone (U.S. Commercial Service 2002:18). Furthermore, the presence of snack food manufacturers such as Pepsi-Cola, Kraft-Nabisco, and Coca-Cola and fast food restaurants has increased in recent years (ibid:32). The result of such importation is a great increase in the availability of foods that are considered undesirable for children by NGO/government workers, schoolteachers, and health care workers.

Neoliberal policies

The Atlantic coast of Puerto Cabezas has also been greatly impacted by the neoliberal policies enacted by the central government after the end of the FSLN administration. “Neoliberalism” describes the eco-nomic philosophy imposed by the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) that dominates much of Latin America. Neoliberal policies promote free en-terprise, free trade, and a restricted governmental role and are also marked by accentuated economic inequality. These policies “came into existence in the 1970’s and 1980’s as a response to various eco-nomic problems generated by…state-dominated sys-tems, including high inflation, low productivity, and heavy foreign indebtedness” (Walker 1997:16). Such policies were enacted in Nicaragua following the end of the Contra War to help boost the national economy that had suffered due to the economic re-striction imposed against the country under the FSLN.

The effects of such policies can be seen on the Atlantic coast. Jobs in Puerto Cabezas were limited in number and filled quickly. In addition, they often

10


did not pay enough to enable to worker to provide the basic necessities for him/herself or his/her family. For example, a social worker for a government agency called Mi Familia reported earning a monthly income of $200 and yet claimed that after paying bills there was barely enough money left for her to eat. However, among those residents I interviewed, this was one of the highest reported salaries. Teachers averaged $70-$100 per month while school directors may earn up to $115-$125. Nurses earned approximately $100, and domestic workers earned $35-$50 per month. Overall, men received better pay for the work they did. Construction workers received 70 to 80 córdobas ($5-$5.50) per day while taxi drivers, fishermen, and divers earned a variable income based on productivity. However, this work was limited in availability, uncertain, and often dangerous. As such, many Puerto Cabezans have attempted to enter the private or informal economy. Families sold bread or boli (frozen juice in a plastic bag) from their homes. Women baked cakes or sweets and sold them out of a basket in the city streets. Others set up small tables in the market and sold small items such as gum and cigarettes. As such, the market is currently saturated with these individuals trying to make some sort of living. In the area between the house where I was living and the hospital – a 30-minute walk crossing through three barrios – there were 63 small stores. These were either booths set up on the side of the road or individuals selling items from their homes and were in addition to the 223 booths in the official market area. Most of the individuals I spoke with at the booths reported that they did sell some goods but not enough to meet their basic needs.

Conclusion

Puerto Cabezas is an area of Nicaragua in which clinical malnutrition is highly prevalent. Doctors, nurses, and other health care workers report high levels of malnutrition among children and even treat occasional cases of kwashiorkor. In this region, however, these high levels of malnourishment can-not be attributed to a lack of food. The area is abun-dant in natural edible resources and residents report eating large varieties of food. The problem then lies at the intersection between these two points.

In this paper, I have argued that competing and contrasting discourses of hunger among several distinct groups of people (NGO/governmental

workers; health care providers/school directors and teachers; mothers) hinder efforts to alleviate hunger and malnutrition in the region. For instance, respondents from the first two groups often blamed hunger on the malnourished’s inability to make proper food choices. Such thinking promotes the idea that the hungry cannot and should not be helped, and are personally responsible for their own situation. In contrast, my ethnographic findings demonstrates mothers seemed to know what the “right” foods for proper nutrition were but could not afford these foods in a great enough amount to feed their families. Also, for aid workers, school teachers, and health care providers milk was seen as a “solution,” but for mothers only employment and an a steady economic base would alleviate the problems.

These competing discourses exist in a larger political economy which, in the case of Nicaragua, plays a central role in the perpetuation of hunger. Neolib-eral policies enacted in the country have diminished the number of jobs available and have led to a satu-rated informal economic sector. Furthermore, a re-liance on export-oriented economics indicates that food items produced in the region are exported in exchange for goods that have little to no nutritional value or that local residents cannot afford. In Puerto Cabezas, mothers seemed to be the most aware that a solution to hunger must be situated within the sphere of the national political economy. However, their voices were often silenced and therefore ac-tions emerged from professional discourse, and mothers were perceived as unknowledgeable and un-able to care for their children. Instead of listening to them, NGO/government workers and health care providers especially conducted programs to educate mothers, but none of these institutions and organiza-tions provided mothers with food or money with which to procure food. According to one mother, “I can’t work. We didn’t eat yesterday and haven’t eaten today because I don’t have money to buy food. The problem is economic. I can’t work so there is no money to pay for food.”

Table 1: Foods Eaten vs. Foods Suggested

What mothers report feed-ing their children

NGO, Government, and Health suggestions for what should be eaten by children

Rice Beans

108

Milk Vegetables

127

11


Gallo pinto (fried beans and rice) Bread Fish Meat Milk Coffee Yucca Oatmeal Coconut Banana Squash Potatoes Eggs

8

55543222111

Fruit Rice Beans Meat Oatmeal Chicken Eggs Banana Fish Cheese Yucca

55552222211

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Diagram 1: Interview Respondents

Notes

1 All names of interview respondents are pseudo-nyms.

2 Milk refers to cow’s milk.

3 Milk has long been conceived of as a food com-modity particularly well suited to meet nutritional needs and as such many “glass of milk a day” pro-grams have been initiated throughout the “develop-ing” world (Stifel and Alderman 2003). Such pro-grams have been in place in Puerto Cabezas but none were in existence during my stay.

4 Trash was one of the most significant environmen-tal problems faced by the region. All the trash in the city collected in the largest market before it was picked up and taken outside of the city, so that es-sentially the city dump was located right next to where people buy food.

5 The World Health Organization (WHO) requires that water for human consumption be less than three percent toxic and fecal matter, and Agua Caribe tested at three percent.

6 The Atlantic coast of Nicaragua is a large center of drug trade. Drug boats running between Colombia and Florida will drop their cargo overboard if inter-cepted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). These bundles would float to shore and were often found by local fisherman who called the packages a “gift from Heaven” or a “godsend.” Sto-ries of communities sharing the wealth of a bale of cocaine found in a fishing trap were abundant, and although I never witnessed drug trade or drug use, many local residents explained to me how the At-lantic coast came to be involved in this enterprise.

7 The Pacific coast has often been portrayed as com-posed of a primarily mestizo, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking population. Recent scholars, however, have refuted such characterizations and argue that there is a wealth of unrecognized cultural and ethnic diversity (for example see Babb 2001 and Gould 1998).8 The presence of foreign businesses in Puerto Cabezas has had serious and destructive ramifica-tions. During his term in office, President Alemán courted many foreign companies to engage in seafood and timber trade. Large foreign companies have rigorously exploited the timber and fish re-

13


courses and successfully dominated small, local farmers, lumber workers, and fishermen. In addi-tion, the foreign companies’ practices of intensive harvesting without a period of rest for the crops, fish, or lumber, are ecologically destructive to the land and its resources. Much of this has occurred in the Atlantic coast, and profits generated for Nicaragua by the presence of the large foreign cor-poration are funneled into the central government in Managua (Parrili 1997).

Works Cited

Babb, Florence E. 2001 After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cul-

tural Politics in Nicaragua. Austin: Univer- sity of Texas.Beckford, George

1972 Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Butler, Judy1997 “Peoples of the Atlantic Coast.” In

Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s. Thomas W. Walker, ed. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.

Gould, Jeffery1996 To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and

the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hale, Charles R.1994 Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indi-

ans and the Nicaraguan State, 1994-1987. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lappé, Frances Moore 1991 Diet for a Small Planet: Twentieth Anniver- sary Edition. New York: Ballantine Books. Lappé , Frances Moore and Joseph Collins 1977 Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. New York: Ballantine Books.

1986 World Hunger: Twelve Myths. New York: Grove Press.

Lappé, Frances Moore and Anna Lappé2002 Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Put- nam.

Leonardi, Richard2001 Nicaragua Handbook. Bath, England:

Footprints Handbooks.Merrill, Tim, ed.

1992 Nicaragua: A Country Study. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress.

Parrili, Mario Davide1997 Coffee and Sesame: Mirrors in the Solution. Envío 16(192):32-39.

Robbins, John1992 May All Be Fed: Diet for a New World.

New York: Avon Books.Robbins, Richard H.

1999 Global Problems and the Culture of Capi-talism. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Sanchez, Pedro2002 Sustainable Development, Food Security,

and Global Health. Lecture presented for University of Iowa 2002 Lecture Series,

Iowa City, October 21.Sollis, Peter

1989 The Atlantic Coast: Development and Autonomy. Journal of Latin American Studies

21(3): 481-520.Stifel, David and Harold Alderman

2003 The “Glass of Milk” Subsidy Program and Malnutrition in Peru. Unpublished.

U.S. Commercial Service2002 Nicaragua Country Commercial Guide.

www.usatrade.gov.Walker, Thomas W.

1997 “Introduction.” In Nicaragua without Illu- sions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s. Thomas W.

Walker, ed. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources.

1986 Nicaragua: The Land of Sandino, 2nd Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

A Comparison of Nutritional Indicators from Bambara and Fulani Girls Born in Paris, France

and in the Segou Region of Mali

By Lisa PawloskiAssistant Professor

George Mason University, College of Nursing and Health Science

4400 University Drive, MSN 3C4Fairfax, VA 22030

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

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mailto:[email protected]


Growth data from Bambara and Fulani girls are compared from those born and raised in France and those born and raised in Mali. The data reveal that Bambara and Fulani girls born in France are taller and heavier than their female counterparts born and raised in Mali. No indicators of obesity are evident among this sample. The sample’s heights and weights match the U.S. reference data such that mean height-for-age z-score is -.02 ± .84, and the mean WAZ is .03 ± .96. Based on the conceptual framework of the biocultural model of human adaptation, these findings have implications regarding the environmental impacts affecting the growth status of Malian adolescent girls. The data suggest that improved growth may be due to improved environmental and cultural factors including increased food availability, safe food and water, a reduction in manual labor, and access to affordable and reliable healthcare. While this sample is relatively small, it appears that U.S. reference data are appropriate for use in non-U.S. populations to determine over and undernutrition. [Adolescent, growth, nutrition, France, Mali]

Introduction

Poor growth and development during childhood and adolescence, including stunting and wasting, is af-fected by many factors such as genetics, poor diet, disease, as well as other environmental influences. To explain such physiological changes in the human body, nutritional anthropologists often refer to a model of human adaptation. This model explores the ways in which humans adjust and cope with en-vironmental challenges (Himmelgreen, 2002). In some instances, humans may physiologically adapt or acclimate to their environment. For example, fac-tors such as poor nutrition and infectious disease can delay the growth process in children and adoles-cents, causing the body to utilize energy sources for life sustaining activities until energy is available to be used for growth. Further, cultural and behavioral adjustments may also assist in coping with environ-mental stresses. Such adjustments may include food-processing techniques, increases or decreases in workloads, or overall food choices (Himmelgreen, 2002). This paper uses a conceptual framework of a biocultural model of human adaptation such that it examines both growth data and environmental fac-tors from Fulani and Bambara girls born and raised in France and in Mali.

Studies on migrants have shown the impact that en-vironmental influences such as improved diet, access

to health care, clean water, can have on growth and development in children and adolescence. Bogin and Loucky (1997) have shown that Maya children living in the United States are significantly taller, heavier, and have more fat and muscle than Maya children living in Guatemala. Further, Maya immi-grants born in Guatemala and Mexico are shorter and lighter than children of Maya immigrants born in the United States (Bogin and Loucky 1997). One early well-known migrant study done by Shapiro (1939) has shown enhanced growth and develop-ment among Japanese children born in Hawaii ver-sus their parents born in Japan. Shapiro suggests this improvement is due to environmental influences including better diet, income, and access to health care . Growth data have also historically been used as indicators of social inequalities (Ulijaszek et al 2000). Research has indicated that children from higher socioeconomic levels mature faster and ado-lescents of high socioeconomic status have an earlier growth spurt when compared with adolescents of the same genetic background but of a low socioeco-nomic status. For example, Howard (1994) dis-cusses the impact that an economic crisis affected Tanzanian children in the early 1970s, such that chil-dren from newly impoverished families showed in-dicators of poor growth and development when com-pared to their wealthy counterparts. Poor growth and development has been reported in Mali among adolescent girls. These studies have shown that when compared to U.S. reference data, Malian girls are shorter and lighter than their healthy counterparts. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that comparisons of growth data be made with international reference data col-lected from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) from the United States when no local refer-ence standard is available with which to make com-parisons (deOnis, 1997; Dean, 1995). Reference populations are intended to provide comparisons and not a standard of growth for all populations. Com-parisons with healthy local reference data of a more similar genetic background would be ideal because of the genetic influences on growth (deOnis, 1997). However, there is no Malian reference database available with which to make comparisons, therefore data from the NCHS have been used as a reference population in this study.

Several environmental factors have contributed to Malian girls’ poor nutritional status including poor diet, a history of malnutrition, heavy workloads, and

15


poor socioeconomic status (Pawloski 2002). If few studies have been conducted concerning the growth, development, and nutritional status among Malian adolescents, even fewer have examined the growth of Malian immigrants. The majority of comparative research of growth data in Mali concerns differences in socioeconomic status. For example, research such as Cashion (1988) and Pawloski (1999) have com-pared growth data of low and high socioeconomic status of Malian adolescent girls that show even wealthier girls suffer from poor nutritional status and are still shorter and lighter than healthy U.S. girls. For these studies, high and low socioeconomic status was based on relative socioeconomic standards within Mali. For example, in Cashion’s study, girls of high socioeconomic status attended private schools, considered to be quite costly in Mali.

Research done on the nutritional status of African immigrants in France has primarily focused on North African populations. These studies have shown some evidence of obesity, which has been a significant problem among immigrant populations in the United States (Roville-Sausse 1999). Examining the growth and development of Malian girls born and raised in France may provide not only valuable comparative data about growth and development of Bambara and Fulani adolescent girls, but also some additional interesting information concerning issues related to obesity among Malian immigrants. These data may provide immigrant associations in France with evidence concerning the nutritional status among West African communities which has not been thoroughly reported.

This article compares growth data from Fulani and Bambara girls born in metropolitan Paris with Fulani and Bambara girls born in the Segou Region of Mali. These data may have implications regarding differences in nutritional status due to differing envi-ronmental influences.

Study Site and Participants

Because Mali is a former French colony, many Malians have moved to France for work and school, and there is now a very large Malian population living in France. France, being an industrialized nation, has a significantly improved overall environment when compared to Mali. Malians living in France have health benefits, greater incomes, electricity, and safe supplies of running water; all of which are not readily available in Mali.

Children also have access to free education, and all of the participants in this study attended school. While Malians receive many social benefits of living in a significantly wealthier country, many Malians living in France are treated poorly, particularly if their legal status is questionable. Some French are concerned that such immigrant populations are draining government resources, and some are concerned with the practice of certain traditions, such as polygyny. One girl’s mother told me that while most Malians feel fortunate to have benefits such as healthcare and education, many do not feel that France is their true home and miss the Malian culture. However, most of the girls I spoke with appeared more concerned with finishing their education and fitting in to French culture.

The majority of Malians live in metropolitan Paris or in the port city of Marseilles. Thus in the attempt to gain as large a sample size as possible, metropolitan Paris was chosen as the most appropriate field site. The sample was selected from members of the Bambara and Fulani ethnic groups living in metropolitan Paris because they are closely related to the Bambara and Fulani groups from Mali who participated in the previous study. Only these two ethnicities were selected in an attempt make a comparison with those with as similar genetic backgrounds as possible in order to better understand how these girls physiologically adapt to their environments. The samples are independent and no attempts were made to match the girls in Paris to the families in Mali. There are limitations however, of using only these two samples to represent Malian immigrants as a whole. The participants were selected by convenience and not randomly and the sample size from Paris was small. After consulting with Migrations Santé, a French research organization focused on the health of migrants in France, three suburban areas surrounding Paris with large Malian communities were selected: St. Denis, Mantes-la-Jolie, and Montfermeil.

Malian research assistants were obtained with the help of a local organization which assists young West African immigrants, l’Association des Jeunes Soninkés de France. These assistants helped in re-cruiting some additional participants during after school activities at a community center. The assis-tants informed the girls about the study and obtained signatures of informed consent that stipulated that participants could drop out of the study at any time

16


and for any reason. While many girls approached chose not to participate due to other obligations, none of the girls who were recruited dropped out of the study. Human Subjects approval of the protocol and informed consent form was issued from the George Mason University’s Human Subjects Com-mittee.

All of the girls were between the ages of 10 and 17 years and were born in the metropolitan Paris area. All girls were born to parents who were born in Mali. All girls attended public French schools. The area where they lived showed a high concentration of immigrants, the majority being from North Africa. Most girls lived in high-rise low income apartments which are typical of these communities. All girls received free health care from the French government and most girls had working parents. Few of the girls came from polygamous households, which are not recognized by the French government. Most of the girls lived with at least one other family or a large extended family so that living rooms were converted into bedrooms in the evenings. All of the girls had access to electricity, potable running water, telephone (many had cellphones), cable television, and modern appliances. However, often conve-niences such as electricity and elevators were not re-liable on a daily basis because they were often out of order. In addition, many of the families and commu-nity leaders mentioned comparatively high levels of theft and muggings. From my observations in both locations, it appeared that crime was much less of a problem in Mali, although none of the participants mentioned those kinds of differences.

Methodology

Anthropometric, maturational, dietary, and ethno-graphic data were collected in the summer of 2000 from a sample of 61 girls (ages 10 to 17 years old) born in the metropolitan Paris area to Malian immi-grants.

Anthropometric data were collected using Lohman, Roche, and Martorell’s (1988) methodologies. The anthropometric measurements taken included weight, height, triceps skinfolds, biceps skinfolds, subscapular skinfolds, and suprailiac skinfolds. Heights were taken using a GMS portable field an-thropometer. Weight was determined using an elec-tronic bathroom-type scale that measures weight in kilograms and percent body fat using bioelectrical impedance. Girls were weighed in light clothing

without shoes. Height was taken in centimeters with the subject standing on level ground. Skinfold mea-surements were taken in millimeters using a Lange skinfold caliper. All measurements were taken by the author and done in a clinical setting. Regarding intra-observer reliability, technical error of measure-ment (Mueller and Martorell 1988) and coefficient of relative variation (Jamison and Ward 1993) were determined and fell within acceptable ranges when compared with other research (Pawloski 2002).

Because the timing of the adolescent growth spurt is variable, maturational indices are useful markers with which to make comparisons rather than using chronological age. One marker of maturational status includes age at menarche. Age at menarche were determined using a retrospective method in which girls were asked for their date of birth and when they begun to menstruate.

Ethnographic data were collected by conducting interviews with girls a small sub-sample of girls (n=6) concerning eating behaviors, workloads, knowledge about nutrition, and living conditions. Additional information on diet were collected as a 24-hour dietary recall from the same small sub-sample of girls. For the 24-hour dietary recalls, girls were interviewed about what they had consumed in the past 24 hours. Girls were only interviewed once. Heights, weights and ages were entered into Epi-Info (Dean et al. 1995) so that z-scores could be determined for height-for-age and weight-for-age. The rest of the quantitative data were entered in SPSS for windows (SPSS Inc. 1996) so that statistical analyses could be conducted. Body Mass Index (BMI) were determined using the equation:

Weight (kg)/ Height (m) 2

BMI-for-age were then compared with reference data from the United States developed from the Centers for Disease Control (Must 1991).

17


Results

Indicators of Undernutrition. The data reveal that the Malian girls born and raised in France have height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) and weight-for-age z-scores (WAZ) that are closer to the U.S. reference girls than Malian girls born in Mali. Distance curves for HAZ and WAZ are plotted in Graphs 1 and 2, and the data are presented in Table 1. The mean HAZ for the total Malian sample born and raised in metropolitan Paris is -.02 ± .84, and the mean WAZ is .03 ± .96. The z-score allows for comparisons with the U.S. reference data, so that a z-score of “0” represents the mean of the U.S. sample. When compared to the U.S. reference girls, the Malian girls born in Paris remain close to a z-score of “0” at most ages except from 15 to 17 years. Concerning the WAZ data, Malian girls born in Paris again remain close to a z-score of “0” at most ages except at ages 13, 16, and 17 years. Note that, the sample sizes for ages 15 to 17 years are small, thus, additional data collection is required to compare the growth patterns of girls for this age group.

T-tests (see Table 1) reveal statistically significant differences (p<.05) for HAZ and WAZ from ages 10 to 14 years between Malian girls born in Paris and Malian girls born in Mali. After age 14, only at age 16 is there a statistically significant difference for WAZ between girls born in Paris and girls born in Mali, however the sample size for these ages is small.

Indicators of Overnutrition. Mean values for Body Mass Index (BMI), BMI-for-age, and percent body fat from skinfold measurements are presented in Ta-ble 2. BMI-for-age data are also plotted in Graph 3. Mean body mass index (BMI) for the Malian girls born in Paris is 19.19 ± 3.48 and for the girls born in Mali the mean BMI is 17.04 ± 2.83. T-tests reveal a statistically significant difference for BMI between Malian girls born in Paris and Malian girls born in Mali (t = 5.71, p<.05). BMI values above 24.1 in 10-year-old girls, 29.1 in 15-year-old girls and 30 in adults indicate obesity (Cataldo et al. 1999).

BMI-for-age is the recommended measure to moni-tor undernutrition and overnutrition among children and adolescents (CDC, 2000). The mean BMI-for-age z-score for the French-born Malian girls was .09 ± 1.00. Thus these girls reveal a mean that is slightly above the U.S. mean BMI-for-age and gen-

der. Only at approximately a z-score above 1, are children considered to be overweight. The BMI-for-age data also are broken down into categories for be-ing underweight, overweight and obese. These cate-gories are developed from the Centers for Disease Control and are used in the United States to deter-mine level of overnutrition (Must 1991). These data are presented in Table 3. Of these girls, 6.6% are at risk for obesity.

Regarding percent body fat, healthy ranges are con-sidered to be between 20.5 and 35% in adults, and some research suggests that above 30% in adoles-cents indicates obesity (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute 1994). These girls reveal a mean body fat percentage of 26.09 ± 6.49.

Age at Menarche. The Malian girls born in France reported mean age of menarche (see Table 4) to be 12.97 ± 1.13 years as compared with Malian girls born in Mali who reported a mean age of menarche to be 14.56 ± 1.80 years. T-tests reveal a statisti-cally significant difference for age at menarche be-tween Malian girls born in Paris and Malian girls born in Mali (t = 3.18, p<.05). There is no statisti-cally significant difference between the mean age of French-born Malian girls and American girls (p > .05). Further, there is no statistically significant difference between the mean age of French-born Malian girls and French girls (p> .05) (Crognier and Tavares da Rocha, 1979).

Dietary interviews and 24-hour dietary recall: From the interviews, girls reported consuming three meals a day. Girls typically eat “French style” in which they use plates and utensils. The 24-hour di-etary recalls revealed that most meals consisted of a staple dish of rice or millet with a meat and veg-etable sauce and consumed a mean intake of 2200 kcalories in one day. Girls reported eating meat al-most every day.

18


Girls also reported that many Malian foods are ex-ported from Mali and are available for purchase at local West African stores and at one of the large markets in downtown Paris. While these foods are more expensive than in Mali, most girls said that their mothers felt they were reasonable in price. Of-ten meals were supplemented with French baguettes and girls admitted to eating fast food such as from McDonald’s, “every once in a while.” Fortified and enriched foods are accessible for purchase by Malians in France but not in Mali. Most foods re-ported were partially prepared (i.e. milled rice and millet and bread). Most families living in France owned cooking appliances such as stoves, ovens, deep fryers, toasters, and refrigerators.

All of the French-born girls attended school and many of the older girls appeared to have fewer re-sponsibilities than their Malian-born counterparts and spent most of their free time “hanging out” with their girlfriends. In Mantes-la-jolie, many of the girls would go to the local community center daily to play games and dance after school. Among the households I observed, few girls prepared meals, which appeared to be a primary responsibility of the mother.

While the living environments had many more mod-ern conveniences than in Mali, many girls reported difficulties concerning transportation and safety. These girls lived in what are called “difficult dis-tricts”. They are far from the center of Paris and de-scribed transportation as expensive and difficult. Many girls were afraid to venture out at night be-cause muggings and robbery in France were consid-ered a common occurrence.

Discussion

Bambara and Fulani girls born and living in France are significantly taller and heavier than Bambara and Fulani girls born and living in Mali. Furthermore, the French-born girls do not show evidence of de-layed development, as measured by menarche, nor do they show much evidence for increased rates of overweight and obesity. Using a biocultural model of human adaptation as a conceptual basis for this study, these data may then suggest that the environ-mental and cultural conditions in France allow for enhanced growth and development among Bambara and Fulani girls born in France when compared to girls born in Mali. Such environmental and cultural

factors that could potentially affect growth include dietary quality, water quality, energy expenditure, household income, and access to regular quality healthcare.

Diet in Mali: 1The diet in Mali typically consists of three main meals. Breakfast consists of sour millet porridge, bread and coffee, or leftovers from the night before. Lunch and dinner usually includes a rice or millet with a sauce. The more commonly consumed sauces include: peanut sauce, leaf sauce, oil sauce, tomato sauce and a sauce of gumbo and baobab leaves. The diets among adolescent girls in Mali are typically high in carbohydrates and low in protein and micronutrients (Pawloski 1999). Very little meat and vegetables are typically consumed. From dietary recall data, Malian girls have reported eating about 1 to 2 ounces of meat a day (Pawloski 1999). Malians eat out of a common bowl; however, men and women eat separately. Most Malians eat with their hands. Very few snacks are eaten, with the exception of seasonal fruits. Girls who cook re-ported that they snacked while preparing meals (Pawloski, 1999). Dettwyler (1986) has reported that younger children appear to have less access to nutrient-dense foods than adults and the elderly. It is believed that elders are to be given the “good foods” first since they are to be respected and often young children have little access to nutrient dense foods like meat and fish (Dettwyler 1986). Adoles-cent girls appear to have increased access to foods as they grow, because not only are they better able to compete for the nutritious foods, but when they be-gin to cook they are able to snack. Most of these meals need to be prepared from scratch and are very labor intensive. The water available in Mali often contains parasites and can lead to severe gastroin-testinal disorders.

Diet in France: Compared to the diet in Mali, the Malian girls in France have greater variety in their diets that may contribute to a higher intake of mi-cronutrients and energy. Further, because these girls have access to many prepared foods, such as en-riched and fortified cereals and bread. The food supply in France is more convenient involving less preparation. The girls in France also have greater access to foods throughout the day due to refrigera-tion and the availability of fast foods. Many of the

1 The dietary data described here is primarily sum-marized from data the author collected in Mali in 1997 (Pawloski, 1999).

19


foods are more nutrient dense in France because of fortification and enrichment. Water is safe to drink. These nutritional and health-related differences may help explain the significant contrast in growth be-tween the girls born in France and those born in Mali.

Workloads: As in many developing countries, girls living in Mali are at risk of nutritional problems be-cause they have to undertake many physically ex-hausting tasks during adolescence and puberty. While adolescent girls are still growing they often must assume adult responsibilities in their daily lives such as doing laundry, making meals, pounding mil-let, gathering firewood, taking care of children, and preparing for marriage and childbirth. As soon as girls are old enough and able, they are taught to take-on various domestic chores. Their responsibili-ties increase as they get older. Very young girls start out carrying small buckets of water until they gain the strength to carry larger buckets. Malian girls re-ported that they were very grateful to have older sis-ters who would take on the bulk of the workloads (Pawloski 1999). In turn, as the girls born in France attend school on a regular basis, have access to pub-lic transportation, consume more prepared foods, and have access to modern appliances. Their work-loads are lighter and their nutritional status is not normally challenged by physically exhaustive activi-ties.

Access to healthcare: In Mali, healthcare is free; however, it is not easily accessible. There are few clinics and few medical supplies for diagnosis and treatment of common illnesses. If they do visit a clinic, families are often required to purchase medi-cations, which they seldom can afford. Infectious and nutritional diseases during early childhood often lead to delayed growth and development. In France, everyone has access to free health care and preventive health care services, including immuniza-tions. In Mali, immunizations are often not avail-able because of lack of resources. Access to better healthcare may significantly impact the growth and development of children.

Overnutrition among Malian girls born in France. While France has a much lower rate of obesity that the United States, the rate of obesity has been rising in France, and particularly among North African im-migrant populations (Roville-Sausse 1999); how-ever, no studies have explored the prevalence of obesity among West African immigrant girls living

in France. Regarding indicators of obesity, the Malian girls born in France reveal indicators that are within a healthy range. The BMI-for-age graph (Graph 3) shows that the Bambara and Fulani girls born in France are close to the mean U.S. reference population at the 50th percentile.

From the BMI-for-age data for the Bambara and Fu-lani girls born in France, 6.6% are considered to be obese. This figure is much lower than data reported from U.S. adolescent girls ages 12 to 19 years, in which 15.5% are considered to be obese (Ogden 2002). Further, Klein-Platat (2003) have recently re-ported that the prevalence of obesity among French adolescent boys and girls is 5.2%. When compared to French data, the prevalence of obesity among ado-lescent girls appears to be slightly, but not signifi-cantly higher among this French-born Malian sam-ple.

French-born Malian adolescent girls appear to reveal few indicators of malnutrition (over or under nutri-tion) when compared to girls born in the Segou Re-gion of Mali. These findings most likely due to fac-tors including increase availability to food, fewer workloads, and greater access to affordable health-care. However, additional research is important to examine any secular trends related to obesity among this population as have been evident in North African immigrants living in Paris.

Conclusions

These findings have many implications concerning the nutritional status of West African immigrants in France and suggest that the environment in France may contribute to better health outcomes such as im-proved growth and development. These findings also present further questions regarding what spe-cific environmental factors have the greatest impact on adolescent girls’ growth and development. Fur-ther, before launching the use of any one standard in pediatric public health programs, the specific cul-tural and environmental factors that play the greatest roles in growth and development must be critically understood. Finally, these results suggest that be-cause there is little evidence of obesity and over-weight among the French-born Malian girls, these girls may be consuming a more optimal diet when compared to their North African immigrant counter-parts. These results need to be interpreted cau-tiously, but indicate a need for further research con-

20


cerning the impact of these environmental and cul-tural factors on the growth of children.

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible with grants from George Mason University. I would like to thank my research assistants in Paris, Mama Doucoure and Mdm. Diallo who helped tremendously in locating Malian communities and recruiting participants. I would also like to thank the following associations and people for their assistance in locating my re-search assistants and participants: Mdm. Jujumera Sylla at the Association des Jeunes Soninkes de France, Mr. Samba Fadiga from ASAMC, and Im-migrations et Santé. I am very thankful to my mother, Diane Pawloski, who graciously assisted me in the field. I am also grateful to my husband, Di-dier Bourgeois, for his technical assistance. Lastly, many thanks to Carlos Sluzki for his valuable input and to Mariette Larrick, for her assistance with data-entry.

Table 1: Height-for-age z-score (HAZ), weight-for-age z-scores (WAZ) of Malian adolescent girls from the Segou Region, Mali* and Paris, France

Years Sample N HAZ Mean SD

WAZMean SD

10 Mali-bornFrench-born

111 11

-.60** 1.13 -.09** .77

-1.17** .84 -.25** .71


151 14

-.70** 1.10 -.09** .82

-1.11** .82 -.29** .99


154 11

-1.06** 1.24 .25** .94

-1.26** .92 .12** 1.09


149 7

-1.17** 1.28 .03** .55

-1.22** .96 .72** .91


165 8

-1.02** 1.14 .14** .49

-1.12** 1.09 .16** .75


116 2

-.79 1.02 -.78 1.68

-1.02 .94 -.20 2.33


141 5

-.44 .95 -.28 1.11

-.92** .91 .60** .86


69 3

-.42 1.19 -.11 1.61

-.83 .92 -.48 .11

* From Pawloski, LR (2002)** Indicates statistical significance (p< 05).

Table 2: Indicators of Overnutrition of Malian Adolescent Girls born in France

Measurement N Mean Standard Deviation

BMI-for-age z-scores 61 .09 1.0

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BMI 61 19.19 3.48

Percent Body Fat (Skinfolds) 61 26.09 6.49

Table 3: BMI-for-age data from French-born Malian girls

Risk Level N Percent

Underweight (<5th perc) 2 3.3

Normal 48 78.7

Risk of overweight (> 85th perc) 7 11.5

Risk of obesity (> 95th perc) 4 6.6

Table 4: Age of menarche

Age of Menarche N Mean Standard Deviation

French-born Malians 60 12.97 1.13

Malian Girls* 491 14.40 .42

U.S. Girls** N/A 12.80 .04

Rural French Girls*** 254 13.05 1.42

* From Pawloski, LR (2002)** Eveleth PB and Tanner, JM (1990)*** Crognier and Tavares da Rocha (1979

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Social Identity and Food Choice in the Southeastern United States

Sarah M. SzurekDepartment of AnthropologyThe University of Alabama

[email protected]

Introduction

Food and the situations surrounding eating are im-bued with individual and social meaning. Modern nutrition information seems to have taken the mean-ing and symbol away from the meal, describing it in terms of portions and calories. A closer look at food choice has indicated strong relationships with bio-logical, environmental, and cultural factors, imply-ing that food choice can be a highly individual mat-ter and, at the same time, influenced by culturally prescribed food norms (Douglas, 1982). Food choices within cuisines can shed light on what kind of cultural meanings we attribute to ourselves and others (Fischler, 1988). The identities thus formed can help to position us in a coherent cultural frame-work in a world where continued globalization of-fers a new menu almost every day. The topic of this

study is the social significance of food to three dif-ferent groups in a small city in the American South.

Food choice is a complex issue that is intimately re-lated to one’s social identity. One’s identity consists of the social and cultural constructions combining individual and collective understandings that mean-ingfully locate an individual in a particular cultural context. The concept of identity is also distinct in that it expresses both similarity and difference to others in society (Jenkins, 1996; see Ashmore et al., 2004 for a discussion on the multidimensionality of identity). Bourdieu’s (1984) reasoning that con-sumption contributes to overt displays of the self and ultimately, one’s lifestyle, is applicable to this dis-cussion of social identity. Bourdieu states that peo-ple “distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make,” including what food choices they make (1984:6). How one comprehends and consumes cul-ture is a marker of one’s place in society, or social identity. This paper will be specifically concerned with the eating habits of day-to-day life, as well as how the cultural meanings of food structure, and are structured by, one’s social identity.

Food is central to one’s social identity, because the self is often asserted through a feeling of belonging to a certain social group that has particular eating habits. By associating with one group, a distinction can be made between it and other groups that eat dif-ferently. Identity construction concerning food re-sults from a lifelong interaction between historical, biological, psychological, economic, social, and cul-tural factors that contribute to what one chooses to eat (Fischler, 1988). In this research, I chose to ex-amine the variation in the eating habits of those peo-ple who have moved away from the generally ac-cepted or mainstream social identity. That is, the comparison is between mainstream and alternative eaters. “Mainstream” or “traditional” eaters are de-fined as those who, given their local or southern up-bringing and heritage, comprise the majority of eaters. These “traditional” eating patterns, consid-ered to be the norm for residents who have been af-fected by local and historical developments, were identified as mainstream. Two groups hypothesized to have alternative identities, athletic and health-con-scious eaters, were chosen for comparison. “Ath-letic” eaters are those who are eating to address spe-cific concerns about energy and physical perfor-mance. “Health-conscious” eaters are those often abstaining from animal products (especially meat), eating less packaged and processed foods, and con-

25


suming more vitamin supplements (Kandel and Pelto, 1980). I argue that notions of mainstream and alternative identity can be studied in relation to the food choices that constitute a cuisine, and further-more, that identity confirmation is evident in an indi-vidual’s eating habits. The ultimate goal then, is to examine how the meanings of food-related situations reinforce the meanings of one’s most salient iden-tity.

Intracultural diversity (see Pelto and Pelto, 1975 for a theoretical discussion) is addressed directly in this study of how social identity relates to food choice. Studying intracultural variation is facilitated by the use of a theoretical orientation that uses a cognitive concept of culture and cultural models. By theoriz-ing culture as both learned (internal) and shared (ex-ternal) systems of knowledge (Goodenough, 1981), certain problems that have been encountered previ-ously by scholars of culture seem to be rectified. Goodenough’s (1981:106) definition of culture, “the things one must know in order to conduct oneself ac-ceptably as a member of that society,” addresses how the individual and the culture interact. This cognitive concept of culture can explain variation in knowledge, and this is made possible by the testing of the distribution of cultural models through cul-tural consensus analysis (Romney, et al., 1986). In addition, cultural consonance analysis (Dressler et al., 1996) allows a researcher to measure to what ex-tent individual behavior matches the collectively shared cultural model. Cultural consonance has emerged as a sound tool for those researchers look-ing to bridge the gap between studies of thought and knowledge and studies of behavior and belief (Dressler et al., 2005). Consensus and consonance analyses were performed on the data collected from the three groups.

This paper will explore food and identity using this specific cognitive theory of culture. Historical infor-mation concerning food habits in the southeastern United States will be briefly discussed, and the sam-ple population will be described as well. The spe-cific method of cultural consensus analysis will be explained as the most comprehensive technique for testing intracultural variation within the groups in the sample. The discussion will focus on the distri-bution of food knowledge, with special considera-tion of healthy foods. The knowledge and beliefs about food can then be compared with actual eating practices using cultural consonance analysis.

Ethnographic Background

Modern mainstream cuisine in the United States has been influenced by the colonial settlement patterns and historical events that characterized the newly formed nation (Levenstein, 1988). Historically, British, Dutch, and German cooking were normal-ized, having dominated the public and private menus of today’s society. However, regional variation in eating habits developed, especially distinguishing the southern states. The unique natural and social environment of the southeastern United States shaped the region’s foodways throughout history.

One of the reasons that the southern states can be distinguished from the northern states was its early dependence on specialized agricultural products. Plantation systems in the 19th century were exceed-ingly prosperous due to the long growing season, and many farmers used their land for one or two cash crops (such as cotton or sugarcane), relying on other sources for their subsistence needs (Hilliard, 1972). During the 19th and early 20th centuries, veg-etables were not part of the ideal diet. At the time, the basic diet of most southerners would have been salt pork, a simple corn bread or other corn dish, sweet potatoes, possibly rice or a vegetable, and cof-fee sweetened with molasses. More wealthy whites were able to afford better cuts of meat, white flour biscuits, gravy, refined sugar, and desserts (McIn-tosh, 1995). The heavy reliance on corn, and the ease of raising and preserving pigs meant that south-ern food became known for its “hog and hominy,” especially for the poorer working class. Pork con-sumption characterizes traditional southern food to the present day (Hilliard, 1972).

Some African foods that were introduced to the South became widely consumed by whites, such as black-eyed peas, watermelon, peanuts, okra, and sorghum. The consumption of these foods provided some sense of continuity from food patterns in Africa for the newly arrived slaves. Also, because they were given so few and such poor rations, there was an increased reliance on vegetables, which some suggest actually resulted in a better health status than that of their holders. There is no doubt that some of the dishes characteristic of the South are the result of the ingenuity of the slaves who had a lim-ited food supply. These foods might have been pre-sented on the slaveholders’ dinner table—a possible explanation as to how they have been incorporated into traditional southern cuisine (McIntosh, 1995).

26


Although the natural environment affected southern food choices, the social environment probably had more to do with the differences from the northern states and also within the region. The hierarchical plantation systems, the constant influx of Africans comprising a slave class, and social class differences among whites affected regional variation, as well as constraints on the food supply during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression (McIn-tosh, 1995). During the Civil War, some farmers switched from cotton to food crops, and it has been hypothesized that vegetable consumption increased at this time. When the war was over, economic and social problems were widely distributed throughout the South. Transportation routes were destroyed, and the work force was chaotic due to the newly freed African-American population seeking wages. Immigrants to the United States settled in the north-ern states to avoid this competition, and as a result, the North became more urbanized and diversified, while the southern region was left to rebuild itself (Hooker, 1981).

Food habits, especially among the poor, generally remained the same after the Civil War. During the Great Depression, southern blacks and whites were still relying on corn, molasses, and salt pork for the majority of their diet (McIntosh, 1995). Increasing industrialization in the food industry slowly began to change the rural and agricultural region, as did the growing awareness of nutrition and food safety (Hooker, 1981). Processing of food became more widespread and preferred in the early 20th century, meaning that households throughout the country no longer had to rely on seasonal foodstuffs (Cussler and de Give, 1942).

Overall, consumers in the modern United States seem to be rather conservative in allowing new eth-nic identities into the mainstream and regional cui-sine. One example is the historical resistance to French haute cuisine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The expression of ethnic identities in the United States has become easier throughout the 20th century, however. In the 1920s, Italian pastas and a variety of tomato-based sauces became the first widely accepted “ethnic” food that was integrated into mainstream American cuisine (Levenstein, 1988; McIntosh, 1995). Today there is a range of options for those people who are seeking a slice of home, with everything from traditional Mexican and Chinese groceries becoming fixtures in some cities,

to four-star Indian and Brazilian restaurants that cater to the upper classes. The availability of differ-ent types of food tends to correspond to the com-plexity of the society in question (Fieldhouse, 1996). So as American society becomes increasingly more complex, the variety of eating styles—and therefore identities—can be said to be on the increase (Buckser, 1999; Warde et al., 1999).

Research for this project took place in a small city in Alabama, population 79,000. It is the county seat and the commercial center for West Alabama. The University is prominent feature in the city, and over 30 percent of those employed in 2000 were involved in the educational, health, and social services. To-day, a major source of industry growth is manufac-turing.

Sample and Methods

The groups of interest here, athletic, health-con-scious, and traditional eaters, came from various community and University outlets. Traditional southern eaters were obtained for the project from one of the many local “Meat and Three (vegetables)” diners close to the downtown and University areas. Concerning the health-conscious category, people from a local health food deli and grocery store were invited to participate. In both of these cases, the par-ticipants volunteered by listing their contact infor-mation on a sign-up sheet. For the athletes, the coach of the University crew team was similarly contacted, and informants signed up after an infor-mational meeting was held. Names of additional in-formants were also collected after individual inter-views had been conducted. Using this snowball sampling method, I inquired if the participant knew any other friends or family (who also ate at the diner, for example) who would be interested in com-pleting the interview. In this manner, quota and con-venience sampling methods were utilized, resulting in a non-random, purposively selected sample of forty-five informants. Institutional Review Board approval was granted and the data were collected mainly from January to early May 2004.

For the first sample, comprised of five participants from each social identity group (n = 15), the ele-ments of the domain were elicited through structured and semi-structured cognitive tasks. Free lists of foods commonly eaten by the participants were gen-erated, and food items mentioned throughout the in-terview were compiled and initially analyzed, based

27


on their frequency of occurrence in this first phase of the research. Thirty-three foods were selected to be part of the second phase. Table 1 is a complete list of the food terms that were selected.

The second sample (n = 30) was interviewed using information garnered from the first sample. Ten new participants from each of the three groups were recruited for further cognitive tasks. These included pile sorts of the 33 food terms, and then ratings of each food item, also accomplished through pile sort-ing. The initial task was an unconstrained pile sort, where each of the informants placed the note cards into groups based on their own criteria of similarity. Then, informants were asked to rate the 33 foods along three different dimensions—the energy-con-tent of the foods, the healthfulness of the foods, and the traditional nature of the foods. These last three sorting tasks were chosen to mirror the three groups that were chosen for this study, with the energy cate-gory corresponding to the athletic group. Energy as a dimension was chosen under the hypothesis that athletes would be concerned with this particular dis-tinction among the foods they eat. For the food fre-quency task, participants were given a chart listing the same 33 foods that were presented on the note cards. I asked each person to rate the foods in terms of how many days in the past two weeks they have been eaten. That is, a ‘zero’ rating meant that the food had not been consumed in the past 14 days. Likewise, a “14” indicated that at least once a day the particular food had been eaten. The purpose of these interviewing techniques was to collect quanti-tative and qualitative data in order to delineate the cultural models that are present in the community, and assess how behavior matches up with this knowledge. Whether or not there was cultural agreement among the participants, it was hoped that the analysis of the data would provide information on the effect of social identity on food choice. Data were analyzed using Anthropac version 4.98.1 (Borgatti, 1992) and SPSS for Windows version 11.0. The unconstrained pile sorts were analyzed using non-metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) and hierarchical cluster analysis. Cultural consensus analysis was used to assess agreement on the three dimensions used in the rating task. If consensus was determined along the dimensions of energy, health, and tradition, it was then possible to use the consen-sus analysis output for Property Fitting (PROFIT) analysis with the MDS graph. Lastly, the food fre-quency data were analyzed using cultural conso-

nance, after which the consonance scores were com-pared using ANOVA.

Consensus analysis produces several types of infor-mation. First, a factor analysis of respondents is per-formed, to evaluate the degree of agreement among them. If there is substantial agreement, this is con-sistent with the existence of a shared cultural model. Usually there is more than one factor found in the data, but consensus can still be determined if this is the case. If the eigenvalue ratio of the first to the second factor is three to one or greater, then it can be assumed that consensus is present. The second type of output from consensus analysis is a cultural com-petence score, usually between zero and one (but sometimes negative), that assesses the approximate amount of knowledge that a person has concerning the dimension in question. Cultural consensus anal-ysis also displays the “answer key,” that is, the ap-proximation of what the correct response to each question is, based on an evaluation of the elicited replies of the sample.

The data gathered on food consumption frequency were evaluated using cultural consonance analysis. Once a dominant model has been identified, cultural consonance can be measured with the purpose of in-dicating which individuals exhibit behavior that is consistently in accordance with the cultural model. That is, cultural consonance scores helped me to bet-ter understand if people were following the models in their day-to-day lives—if eating behaviors were consistent with knowledge about food. This method has been particularly well suited to studying health outcomes and disease risk (Dressler and Bindon, 2000; Dressler et al., 2005). In order to calculate the consonance scores, the answer key from the consen-sus analysis output was used to identify which foods are most characteristic of the energy, health, and tra-ditional food models. Individuals were given a score from zero to two in order to indicate if they ate none, a little, or a lot of these 33 foods, based on their re-sponse from the food frequency task. The zeros, ones, and twos were then simply added up across the list of foods to create the consonance score. Those individuals with the lowest score would be the least consonant, and vice versa. It is important to note that although one might know which foods best rep-resent the model, determined by a high competence score, one might not choose or be able to eat those foods, thus resulting in a low consonance score. Once individual scores are calculated, it is then pos-sible to see if any one group is more consonant than

28


the others, by comparing mean consonance scores using ANOVA tests.

Results

Over 60 percent of the sample was age 30 or younger, with the median age being twenty-four years. Concerning the ethnicity of the participants, 93.3 percent identified themselves as white. No African Americans signed up to participate in the study. All but one participant had at least some col-lege education. In my sample, 26.7% of the partici-pants reported making less than $10,000 in the past year. The large number of full-time student partici-pants who were otherwise unemployed most likely contributed to these data. Overall, this sample seems to be somewhat younger, mostly white, and more educated compared to city, state, and national statistics reported from census data (United States Census Bureau, 2000). Table 2 presents the descrip-tive characteristics for this sample.

The 33 food terms that were selected from the first round of interviews are graphed using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling. Each food item is com-pared to every other food, and is plotted on the graph in a way that maintains the perception of the partici-pants concerning which food items should be to-gether. That is, similar items are represented as hav-ing closer proximity, while those food items that are seldom or rarely sorted together are plotted further away. For example, the food items of “broccoli” and “sweet tea” were never sorted into the same piles by the participants. The MDS technique repre-sents this distinction by placing them relatively far apart on the graph. In Figure 1, the distances be-tween items correspond to their similarity or dissimi-larity according to the cultural schemas of the partic-ipants. In other words, for this graph similarity is preserved as distance. This same unconstrained pile sort data was also analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis. This procedure may be used to delineate the food items that were pile sorted into discernible groups. Figure 1 also shows the groups that were created based on the cluster analysis. These meth-ods provide an appropriate analysis of the uncon-strained pile sort data, as the elliptical clusters are representative of the reasons that the participants used to create various piles. Most informants said that they grouped the cards based on what they knew of the U.S. Department of Agriculture food pyramid categories.

The dimension of health was analyzed using consen-sus analysis in Anthropac. Every food item was rated on a three-point scale as being most to least healthy. The first eigenvalue was found to be 20.4, which explains 89 percent of the variability in the re-spondents’ answers. The ratio of the first to the sec-ond factor was extremely high—13.7 to 1. Esti-mated knowledge of the participants was also very high, with an average of 0.82. According to Caulkins (1998), this would mean that, on average, a participant had the answer that was considered to be culturally correct over 80 percent of the time. Based on these results, it is possible to conclude that there is a single, strong model for the dimension of the perceived healthiness of foods.

The athletic group seems to be the most knowledge-able of the three, as seen by their tight clustering at the center of the data point spread in Figure 2. The average competence for the group was 0.88. The means for the health-conscious and the traditional group were 0.82 and 0.75, respectively. The mean differences in competency among the three sub-groups was found to be significant (F = 3.4, p = .05). A post-hoc LSD test was performed after the ANOVA, which demonstrates that there are signifi-cant differences (p = .02) between the athlete group and the traditional group. That is, the athletes have significantly more knowledge about the healthful-ness of the foods than the traditional group, but not the health-conscious group.

The fact that the athletes had the most similar an-swers is not surprising, considering the nature of the athletic group—that it was comprised mostly of indi-viduals who were part of a cohesive sports team. Participants in every group presumably are subject to the same barrage of news reports, magazine and newspaper articles, and television advertisements that discuss which foods are and are not healthy. The athletes, however, had another source of infor-mation from which to obtain additional knowledge about health—the crew team coach. He has a pro-fessed interest in sports, nutrition, and education, and told me that he tries to impart healthy eating knowledge to the team members whenever possible. The team members spent time together everyday at practices, were friends, and even roommates. Some athletes mentioned that they ate with other team members on a regular basis. Their close interaction provided many opportunities for knowledge about the healthfulness of particular foods to be accumu-lated and refined. As a result, the athletes can be

29


thought of as a more cohesive social group com-pared to the other two. It must be noted, however, that the team does not receive funds from the Uni-versity (the coach volunteers his time), and it was therefore assumed that the team members would be faced with the choice of eating for athletic reasons, rather than being obliged to eat a certain way by a University-sponsored athletic program. This flexi-bility and opportunity for personal dietary choice among informants was identified as being important for the goals of this project. Even though one group has proved to be more knowledgeable, the high ei-genvalue ratio indicates that overall knowledge on healthy foods is substantial and widespread regard-less of one’s social identity.

The cultural key provided by Anthropac outlines what the culturally correct answers are estimated to be, considering the competence levels of all of the informants. Those foods that are considered to be most healthy are oranges, fruit, bananas, broccoli, and water. The foods least likely to be considered healthy were sweet tea, ice cream, and cobbler, with chips and fast food tying for the least healthy foods among the 33 terms. Table 3 presents the cultural key, listing the foods and their rating (expressed as a weighted average ranging from three to one), from most healthy to least healthy.

The thirty informants of the second group also rated the food items in terms of their energy content. When consensus analysis was performed, it became clear that there was no agreement among these par-ticipants due to the low eigenvalue ratio of 1.7. In addition, the average estimated knowledge of the 30 informants was very low—0.12, with a high stan-dard deviation of 0.52.

Tradition as a dimension had a high level of consen-sus among the 30 participants. The eigenvalue pro-duced for the first factor was 15.2, and this first fac-tor explained 77.8 percent of the variability in the answers of the respondents. The ratio of 6.8 to 1 be-tween the first and second factor indicates that there is a good deal of agreement about what food items are considered to be traditional. The average knowl-edge of the participants was 0.69, with a standard deviation of 0.18. Upon examining each informant’s competence scores, I noticed that there were two outliers in the sample. Both were athletes, with knowledge scores of -0.09 and 0.36. Interestingly, both of these participants identified themselves as “Italian Americans,” and alluded throughout the in-

terview to the kinds of meals that they and their fam-ilies share. Although the participants were in-structed during the traditional rating task that “tradi-tional” food was to mean what people around the lo-cal area usually eat, it seems that these two athletes had a different cognitive schema when sorting the cards. If these two outliers are removed from the sample, the average estimated competence of the 28 remaining participants increases to 0.73.

I was interested to find that the health-conscious eaters and not the traditional eaters were the most knowledgeable group in this dimension, with only two scoring below the original average of 0.69. The mean competence for this group was 0.75. The mean competence of the athletes was 0.59, and was 0.73 for the traditional eaters. Figure 3 is a graph representing the distribution of these competence scores. Concerning the knowledge scores of the health-conscious group, I think it is possible that the alternative identity of health consciousness has been achieved through extensive learning about the per-ceived negative aspects of the traditional food di-mension. That is, in order to reject the mainstream model, individuals must come to a clear understand-ing of what exactly it means to be a traditional eater. The question remains as to whether or not the means for the different groups were significantly variable. An ANOVA test was performed to see if social iden-tity could explain some of the variability in the re-sponses. The test did not support the hypothesis that the health-conscious group possesses more knowl-edge about the dimension of tradition at a signifi-cance level of .10, although it was very close (F = 2.3, p =.12). Although the means of the groups were not found to be different, a Levene’s test demon-strated that there is a significant difference among the variances of the three groups (F = 2.6, p = .10).

The cultural answer key presents some interesting information when the foods that were ranked as tra-ditional are compared to the foods that were ranked healthy, as seen in Table 3. The foods that were rated as most traditional were sweet tea, cornbread, chicken, meat, and beef. Those foods rated least tra-ditional were organic food, vitamins, whole wheat bread, broccoli, and pasta. When I compared the most and least healthy foods to the most and least traditional foods, I noticed that three of the most tra-ditional foods—sweet tea, cornbread, and beef—were listed among the top ten least healthy foods. Similarly, broccoli, whole wheat bread, and organic food, considered to be some of the least traditional

30


foods, were rated as being among the most healthy foods. A correlation was performed to test the cul-tural answer keys for tradition and health. The ranked data for all of the 33 foods in both of these dimensions were found to be negatively correlated and highly significant (R = -.50, p < .01). That is, this correlation test provides evidence that the foods considered to be traditional are not considered to be healthy, and vice versa.

While much information was collected concerning the way people perceive aspects of food and eating in a cognitive sense, it is necessary to examine what the participants report as actually eating in their day-to-day lives. This examination is necessary in order to determine if there is a correlation between one’s cultural models (knowledge) and food choices (be-havior). Food frequency data were collected and variability among the responses from those in the different subgroups was observed. Table 3 lists the general food frequency data averaged for all three groups. The frequency data specific to each social identity group can be found in Table 4. Specifically, it appears that athletes are drinking more milk, while those who consider themselves to be health-con-scious are drinking less. In addition, athletes seem to be eschewing white bread for wheat bread, rating it higher than the total mean. Athletes also reported eating the most meat, fruit, and cereal when com-pared to the other groups. They also seemed to eat the least cobbler, cornbread, and organic food. Health-conscious eaters, while consuming somewhat less milk, reported eating slightly more carbohy-drates than the athletes or traditional group. Healthy eaters consumed more potatoes, chips (which tied with fast food as least healthy), organic food, and fish than any other group. Foods eaten less than the other two groups were ice cream, pasta, and eggs. Those in the traditional group consumed the most bread, vitamins, fast food, and beef compared to the other two groups. Sweet potatoes, oranges (rated as the most healthy food), and pork were the foods that were reported as being eaten the least by traditional group members. Compared to the other two groups, pork was consumed the least by the traditional group, which raises questions about the salience of pork in the traditional southern diet, as suggested by the literature.

The food frequency data are somewhat consistent with the modern meal structure described by Dou-glas (1982). While Douglas reported that meat was the “centerpiece” of the meal in Britain, the food fre-

quencies suggest that the focus of the meals eaten is on those foods that are regarded as staples—carbo-hydrates. However, when participants were asked to create an ideal menu for solitary and social eating situations, most people mentioned the meat of the meal first. Specifically, when asked about solitary meals, a meat item was listed first 56% of the time. For menus created for social meals to share food with family or friends, meat was mentioned first 71 percent of the time. So although participants might actually be eating a larger quantity of mashed pota-toes and rice, the meat is identified as being “what’s for dinner.”

There seems to be a certain level of homogeneity in the food frequency data in Table 4. It was surmised that even if people knew the same model of food re-gardless of their group designation (as was evi-denced using the consensus analysis data), there might still be some differences in consumption that would correspond to social identity. I was specifi-cally interested in what kinds of differences existed, especially regarding the consumption of foods thought to be healthy. PROFIT analysis supported this focus on the healthy foods, by using multiple re-gression to investigate if the dimensions of health and tradition shaped the first unconstrained pile sort-ing task. The knowledge about health was found to be a factor that was strongly driving the groupings of the 33 foods, with a multiple R of 0.85. Tradition had a multiple R of 0.49. It is interesting to note that health was such a significant factor even before I mentioned the concept of healthy versus unhealthy foods to the participants. That is, before I made rat-ing the foods according to healthfulness a conscious task, the PROFIT analysis shows that participants had already used this dimension to make meaningful distinctions among the food items. Following the di-rection of the two labeled regression lines in Figure 1, it is possible to see that in general, foods become less healthy as they become more traditional.

Again, I wanted to check if there were patterns in healthy food consumption that could be observed without simply summing or averaging the frequen-cies for each group. Cultural consonance analysis provided just such a tool for this task. Eight of the top 10 most healthy foods were used. Water was left out due to its high daily consumption in each group, and peas were left out due to extremely low con-sumption in each group. Each individual was rated on their consumption from zero to two, and the con-sonance scores could therefore range from zero to a

31


maximum of 16 if an individual received a rating of two for each of the eight foods. The actual range was from four to 14. Those with the lowest scores were the least consonant, eating less of the healthy foods than those people with the highest consonance scores. It is possible to see the diversity among the three groups regarding who is eating the healthiest in Figure 4. The athletes are tightly clustered with a high mean of 10.9, indicating that they are eating many of the foods that they know to be healthy. Some of the health-conscious individuals had a con-sonance score higher than the most consonant ath-letes, but their overall mean score is about the same, 9.8. The mean consonance of the traditional group, 7.7, was well below the overall mean of 9.5. It is important that in general, everyone knew the model of healthy eating, but the athletes and health-con-scious people have slightly more competence, or knowledge. It seems that the athletes and health-conscious people know more, but they also consume more of what they know to be healthy, as indicated by their consonance scores. The average conso-nance scores were found to differ significantly from one another (F = 3.95, p = .03, tLSD p = .02). Again, the athletes are eating more of the most healthy foods, followed closely behind by the health-con-scious and then the traditional folks. It is clear that consonance analysis has unpacked the variation in the consumption patterns of the three groups. In short, it is possible to conclude that differences are emerging from the overall agreed-upon core diet of all of the participants in this sample.

The sample as a whole can be considered to be oper-ating under one shared cultural model concerning how people in this small city in the American South think about food. Evidence has been presented that supports that health is one of the driving forces be-hind what participants choose to eat. The consensus for the health ratings of foods was higher than any of the other tests, suggesting that the agreement on this dimension is widespread among all of the infor-mants. In terms of their actual eating practices, pat-terned variation by social identity group was found.

Discussion

It has been determined that participants were con-ceptualizing food based on a shared cultural model. Qualitative analysis of the interviews indicated that information about the negative health consequences of a high calorie, high fat diet with little vegetable or fruit consumption has permeated the models of the

participants in this study. The results of the inter-views on the healthfulness of food is evidence that the information being presented to the public is be-ing comprehended, but implementation of that knowledge through actual eating practices has been only variably successful in certain groups of the gen-eral population.

I believe that most of the participants are in posses-sion of a traditional background that has influenced their beliefs about food, as well as their patterns of consumption. It seems that most participants are op-erating on some level with an overarching traditional identity. It is interesting that these participants, while growing up with a traditional model of what food items make up a meal, are situated at a particu-lar cultural locus where knowledge about the con-nections between food and health is becoming more widespread—not just in the southeastern United States, but in the entire country. Some participants seem to have embraced this new knowledge about health, fusing it with their existing traditional cul-tural model. This altered model, focused on obtain-ing better health, is affecting how people think about food and eating. However, this cognitive shift has not yet compelled all people to change their actual eating habits, according to the data presented here. Their attitudes toward food are similar, and, particu-larly along the dimensions of health and tradition, agreement was also found. It seems that the strong-est consensus concerns the healthfulness of food. These data are similar to the results that Newkirk et al. (2005) found in Brazil, where the dimension of health was found to be the most salient when people were interviewed about food in general and their eat-ing habits in particular. Notably, this finding pro-vided evidence that cultural models of food in Brazil had changed over the past 10 years, as the dimension of prestige was determined to be the most important factor driving food choice in the past (Oths et al., 2003). What forces are driving the adoption of this new healthy model in the United States, and how much of the mainstream model has to be altered in order for patterns of consumption to change are questions that would be interesting to pursue through further research. The sample as a whole appears to operate under one shared cultural model concerning how they think about food. Yet substantial intracul-tural variation among the groups was present. For some of the dimensions tested, one group or another had significantly more knowledge than the other two groups. Upon examining the mean competence for each task by subgroup, it was found that the health-

32


conscious group has more knowledge in the tradi-tional dimension. The athletic group was found to possess more competence in the dimension of health.

The results from consensus analysis demonstrate that people in the sample have a shared model of food. According to the consonance analysis, the same cannot be said for the actual eating practices. Only some people are eating healthfully, and there seems to be a link between doing so and having an alternative identity. These differences may have to do with social class in terms of education and in-come. The athletes were all college students who were raised in middle to upper-middle class families. The health-conscious people were a bit older, the most educated group, and the group that made the most money. The social class of the athletes and the health-conscious group was basically the same, while the traditional folks made a lot less money and had slightly less education. It seems then that the people with the most money and education—the ath-letes and the health-conscious people, are somehow setting the standard and driving the consensus about the healthiness of food. They are the ones who de-termine what is healthy and what is not, and this knowledge trickles down to the traditional people. Health knowledge was also found to be concentrated in the upper class for Newkirk et al. (2005), and the authors suggest that this knowledge in fact is used by the upper class to uphold their social position and preserve differences between themselves and the lower classes.

The surprising amount of homogeneity in the sample leads me to believe that the participants had many different ways of thinking about their own identity relative to others in society. For example, while each person in the athlete group agreed that they were an athletic eater, they also displayed attributes of the other two groups. What I am referencing is the concept of multiple identities (Goodenough, 1965), which merits further exploration. It seems that while most of the crew team members identified themselves as being an athlete, most came from tra-ditional southern backgrounds. Also, as was demon-strated in the health ratings, most in the sample had acquired knowledge about what it means to be health-conscious. All of this knowledge about what needs to be eaten for good performance throughout the day, about personal family history that shapes likes and dislikes, and about how carbohydrate, pro-tein, and fat ratios in every meal affect the body’s

metabolism, influences individuals every day as they sit down at the table, regardless of their achieved so-cial identities.

Returning to the concept of culture and culture the-ory, one aspect of cultural models used to under-stand the shared and learned knowledge in society is that the knowledge in other people’s brains affects you whether you want it to or not. It appears very true in this case, where the knowledge of the tradi-tional people about healthy foods is being affected by what those of higher social class think. They do not know it perfectly, but they definitely know it. At the same time, it is possible to know the other mod-els even though they may not want to follow them. One can know something without believing it or be-having it. This is true for the majority of my sample, because their actions have not caught up with their knowledge yet. Cognitive anthropology can be use-ful to answer future research questions concerning when individuals arrive at the point where they be-gin to eat differently—that is, when this knowledge about health will actually affect their behavior.

Conclusion

This project provides a window onto the understand-ings about food in one southeastern U.S. commu-nity. The study of food habits among the human species is an extremely complex task, and it has be-come clear that many influential and interrelated fac-tors affect how individuals and groups make deci-sions about food and eating. The participants in this study have provided evidence that they are operating with one cultural model concerning the domain of food. While agreement and knowledge is variable and spread out among the informants, certain gener-alizations can be formulated. Individuals in the three groups share cultural knowledge about the be-liefs and behaviors surrounding food. There is agreement about what foods are traditional, and there is strong agreement in the dimension of health when it comes to food. Health seems to be the most salient dimension for the individuals who were inter-viewed. Consonance analysis demonstrated that cul-tural factors are influencing people to eat the same core diet, with some variation according to one’s so-cial identity. The cognitive anthropology techniques used in this project have proved to be a useful for the investigation of this particular domain. Knowledge about food, health, and eating are becoming ubiqui-tous regardless of one’s social standing or identity, and distribution of that knowledge has become more

33


widespread and shared. However, social identities are at work shaping the food choices of individuals in the southeastern United States.

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Tables and FiguresTable 1: List of 33 food items used in the Phase Two interviews.

Athlete Health Traditional GeneralCarbohydrate bread whole wheat

bread cornbread cereal

pastaProtein eggs fish pork chicken

beefVegetable sweet potatoes broccoli peas salad

green beansFruit bananas oranges potatoes* ---

Snack Item chips ice cream cobbler ---

Drink water milk sweet tea ---Miscellaneous vitamin supple-

mentorganic food casserole fast food

cheeseCategorical --- --- --- meat

carbohydratesvegetablefruit

*No salient fruit was identified in the traditional interviews, therefore potatoes, a food that was mentioned fre-quently, was substituted.

35


Athlete n = 15 Health n = 15 Traditional n = 15 Total n = 45

n % n % n % n %Sex (% female) 8 53 9 60 5 33 22 48.9Ethnicity (% white) 13 87 15 100 14 93 42 93.3Age-18 to 21-22 to 30-over 30

114-

73.326.7-

1410

6.726.766.7

267

13.340.046.7

141417

31.131.137.8

Education-some college-graduate school

15-

100-

149

9360

157

10047

2816

62.235.6

Income-10,000 or less-11,000 to 20,000-21,000 to 30,000-31,000 to 40,000-41,000 to 50,000-over 50,000

94---2

60.026.7---13.3

221-19

13.313.36.7-6.760.0

541122

33.326.76.76.713.313.3

121021313

26.722.24.42.26.728.9

Health Trad Freq Health Trad Freq Health Trad Freqoranges 3.00 1.98 1.7 organic food 2.81 1.07 1.9 pasta 2.01 1.93 3.5fruit 2.98 2.22 7.5 green beans 2.78 2.86 2.5 beef 1.99 2.91 3.8banana 2.97 2.15 3.5 vitamins 2.66 1.19 7.7 bread 1.87 2.83 7.3broccoli 2.95 1.91 2.4 milk 2.65 2.83 8.4 cheese 1.85 2.80 7.3water 2.94 2.38 13.2 potatoes 2.43 2.90 3.3 cornbread 1.72 2.97 0.6vegetables 2.93 2.77 11.2 sw. potatoes 2.43 2.89 0.4 casserole 1.56 2.80 0.6wheat bread 2.90 1.50 5.8 eggs 2.42 2.91 3.4 sweet tea 1.15 2.98 4.6

fish 2.89 2.51 1.6 carbohydrates 2.37 2.83 13.5 ice cream 1.06 2.87 1.9salad 2.85 2.32 4.8 cereal 2.31 2.50 6.1 cobbler 1.03 2.80 0.5peas 2.82 2.58 1.2 meat 2.13 2.92 10.7 chips 1.00 2.57 2.7chicken 2.81 2.93 6.4 pork 2.10 2.82 1.2 fast food 1.00 2.62 3.6

Table 4: Mean food frequencies from the two-week dietary recall. The 10 healthiest items are shaded, and the five unhealthiest are bolded. The 10 most traditional items are capitalized.

Athlete Health Traditional Total

36

Table 3: Consensus analysis cultural answer keys for the health and traditional dimensions, and the over-all frequencies for the three groups. The foods are rated from most (three) to least (one), and frequency is measured in times eaten in the past two weeks.

Table 2: Demographic characteristics for the sample.


MeanFrequency(n=10)

MeanFrequency(n=10)

MeanFrequency(n=10)

MeanFrequency (n=30)

water 14.0 carbohydrates 14.0 water 14.0 carbohydrates 13.5carbohydrates 13.9 vegetables 11.9 carbohydrates 12.6 water 13.2vegetables 12.1 water 11.6 MEAT 11.6 vegetables 11.2milk 11.8 MEAT 8.8 vegetables 9.7 MEAT 10.7MEAT 11.6 white bread 8.5 white bread 8.6 milk 8.4fruit 9.9 fruit 8.2 milk 8.3 vitamins 7.7wheat bread 9.0 cheese 7.3 vitamins 8.4 fruit 7.5cereal 8.7 vitamins 7.7 CHICKEN 7.5 cheese 7.3cheese 8.3 milk 5.2 cheese 6.4 white bread 7.3CHICKEN 8.0 salad 4.6 fast food 5.1 CHICKEN 6.4vitamins 6.9 cereal 4.8 BEEF 5.0 cereal 6.1salad 6.6 wheat bread 4.7 cereal 4.7 wheat bread 5.8EGGS 5.4 SWEET TEA 4.2 fruit 4.5 salad 4.8SWEET TEA 5.5 CHICKEN 3.6 SWEET TEA 4.1 SWEET TEA 4.6pasta 4.9 POTATOES 3.5 wheat bread 3.8 BEEF 3.8white bread 4.7 fast food 3.0 pasta 3.6 fast food 3.6banana 4.0 banana 3.5 salad 3.2 pasta 3.5BEEF 3.5 chips 3.2 POTATOES 3.1 EGGS 3.4oranges 3.2 BEEF 2.9 banana 3.0 banana 3.5POTATOES 3.2 organic food 2.9 chips 2.8 POTATOES 3.3broccoli 3.2 GREENBEAN 2.1 GREENBEAN 2.5 chips 2.7GREENBEAN 2.9 EGGS 2.1 EGGS 2.6 GREENBEAN 2.5fast food 2.7 pasta 2.0 organic food 2.6 broccoli 2.4ICE CREAM 2.5 broccoli 2.1 ICE CREAM 1.9 ICE CREAM 1.9chips 2.1 fish 1.8 peas 1.8 organic food 1.9pork 1.5 oranges 1.6 broccoli 1.9 oranges 1.7fish 1.3 ICE CREAM 1.3 fish 1.6 fish 1.6SW POTATO 0.8 peas 1.2 cobbler 1.2 peas 1.2peas 0.7 pork 1.1 pork 0.9 pork 1.2casserole 0.5 CORNBREAD 0.8 CORNBREAD 0.8 casserole 0.6organic food 0.3 casserole 0.7 casserole 0.7 CORNBREAD 0.6CORNBREAD 0.2 cobbler 0.3 oranges 0.4 cobbler 0.5

37

101010N =

GROUP

TraditionalHealthAthlete

Com

pete

nce

Scor

es fo

r H

ealth

Rat

ing

1.0

.9

.8

.7

.6

.5

.4

6

Figure 2: Distribution of competence scores in the dimension of health.


1.5

1.0

.5

0.0

-.5

-1.0

-1.5

1.5

1.0

.5

0.0

-.5

-1.0

-1.5

VEGGIE

CHEESE

CHIPS

BANANA

PEAS

GREENB

MEAT

WATERVITAMIN

CASSEROLE

BEEF

FRUIT

CHICKEN

SALAD

CARBS

PORK

CEREAL

ORGANIC

FASTFOOD

PASTA

COBBLER

CORNBD

BROCCOLI

EGGS

BREAD

ORANGE

ICECRMSWEETTEA

SWEETPOT

FISH

MILK

WHEAT

POTATO

HealthMultiple R = 0.85

TraditionMultiple R = 0.49

Figure 1: Multi-dimensional scaling diagram with cluster analysis ellipses and PROFIT analysis regression lines.

Figure 3: Distribution of competence scores in the dimension of tradition.


101010N =

GROUPID

HealthTraditionalAthlete

Com

pete

nce

Sco

re fo

r Tr

aditi

onal

Rat

ing

1.0

.8

.6

.4

.2

0.0

-.2

20

2

39

Figure 4: Distribution of cultural consonance scores for healthy eating.


Evaluation of pastoral livelihood opportunities: a case of West Pokot district

Charles Ogoye-NdegwaKenya Agricultural Research Institute,

Trypanosomiasis Research CentreP.O. Box 362 KIKUYU 00902, Tel. 254 – 0733-

713031E-mail: [email protected]

My field research involvement has focused on food security and rural livelihood opportunities, particu-larly for the last six years as a researcher with the Kenyan-Danish Health Research (KEDAHR) Project that was funded by DANIDA and the Danish Bil-harziasis Laboratory (DBL). I have for the last one year pursued the same research interest as a re-searcher with the Kenya Agricultural Research Insti-tute (KARI). While my previous research involve-ment has been food security in the context of crop production, currently I am more into livestock pro-duction research, and particularly in tsetse and try-panosomosis endemic pastoral areas of Kenya.

The overall objective of tsetse and trypanosomosis control surveys from a socio-economics perspective is to provide a participatory rural approach as the ar-eas are opened up for increased productivity follow-ing successful tsetse and trypanosomosis control and eradication approaches. Often, the research survey team consist of social scientist, veterinary doctor, entomologist, environmental scientist and field tech-nicians. At a national level, tsetse and trypanosomo-sis endemic areas are expansive, and the limited government funding is a big draw back in research and coverage. The field situation is extremely diffi-cult - insecurity, lack of accommodation and ex-tremely high temperatures.

Research rationale

It is estimated that well over 90 percent of livestock in Africa are maintained in small holdings and vil-lages where 80 percent of traction power is non-mechanised, with women and children being the beasts of burden in the absence of draught animals. According to the University of Glasgow Report (University of Glasgow 1997), the availability of an ox to a family unit can increase their output six-fold. Livestock contributes a significant social aspect in sustainable rural livelihood.

While it remains important to retain agricultural ex-tension officers who advise on various animal and livestock husbandry issues, the socio-economic and cultural significance attached to both land and live-stock must be appreciated. Local conceptions of pro-duction systems, whether livestock or crop, are cru-cially important, and so do issues of land carrying capacity, livestock disease burden, crop yield and optimal production strategies. These should be ap-proached from community participatory perspectives if they were ever to be sustainable.

The population

West Pokot lies in the arid and semi-arid lands of Kenya, and one of the 18 districts in Rift Valley Province. It borders Uganda in the west and Trans Nzoia and Marakwet Districts to the south, Baringo and Turkana districts to the east and north respec-tively. The district covers an area of about 9064 km² stretching a distance of 132km from north to south. Nomadic pastoralism is the major economic occupa-tion, and poses great challenges to development.

Acute water problem for humans and livestock con-sumption often lead to emergence of water borne diseases and loss of livestock during dry spell. There is low output and inadequate food supplies leading to food insecurity and high dependence on relief food whose distribution are highly hampered by poor infrastructure and insecurity. Population growth rate is high, as indicated by the age bracket of 0 – 4 years that constitutes a high percentage of 23.4 percent of the total population. In relation to low agricultural productivity, this growth rate is alarming, noting that the resources are stretched be-yond limit with every addition of the population. The transport network is poorly served, and live-stock market access is highly limited, leading to high exploitation by middlemen. Illiteracy and school drop out rate is alarmingly high, and occasioned by early marriages and child labour (Republic of Kenya 2002). The people, particularly women and children are at the greatest risk of malnutrition and threats of starvation with the ever-worsening food security sit-uation.

Salient development issues include food security sit-uation, provision of amenities such as schools and hospitals, insecurity, environ metal conservation and management and gender equality.

40

mailto:[email protected]


Evaluating the Pokot production system

“Evaluation of a system is the process of determin-ing a particular quantitative or qualitative value for it, such as efficiency (output/input ratio) or well-functioning (appropriate or sophisticated resource utilization)” (Kaufmann 1998:17). In this regard agricultural systems components (livestock and crop production) can be ranked, assessed and evaluated on the basis of their values. Ranking is useful in the comparative analysis of different production strate-gies or different production systems. In so doing this, and to get meaningful results, the socio-eco-nomic, environmental and infrastructural conditions need to be considered. This is particularly necessary because whether in simple, complex or extensive production systems, socio-economic and environ-mental factors determine production success, and so do production objectives.

Like in other pastoral communities, the evaluation of livelihood opportunities in West Pokot is informed by the following considerations: that the need for food is acute throughout the year for the poorly served local system, that livestock production need to be stabilised even in the absence of water and pas-ture, that there exist opportunities for improved hus-bandry leading to improved livestock production, that enhanced self efficiency and sufficiency in use of scarce resources like labour, forage and water are achievable, and that traditional social organisations and networking can be utilised to encourage oppor-tunism and hence facilitate the appropriate use of re-sources with due regard to safeguarding the right and roles of livestock and the nutritionally vulnera-ble group, particularly women and children.

Pokot household resource management

Pastoralism is the mainstay of Pokot household livelihood. Treated as a system, livestock production is determined by the availability of labour, demand, and wealth status. Labour availability and wealth status often intertwined. Wealth depends on manage-rial skills, the vicissitudes of theft, the demands for stock, livestock disease infestation and the initial herd size. Often, the development status of the fam-ily determines the availability of labour and this de-pends much on wealth. In a feedback disposition, livestock supports households through product out-put, and in turn the household supports the livestock through labour input.

In Pokot pastoral production system, the availability of labour often determines the amount of water and feed available to the herds, either through watering or forage commandeering. Dedicated herders pro-vide high quality labour, and the herders' skills de-termine the effectiveness of herd management and therefore the welfare of the herds. Livestock produc-tion is ranked highest and attracts school age chil-dren and women, leaving other socio-economic ac-tivities such as schooling and crop production as least developed and barely served.

Access to a household's strategic resources is often determined by the available wealth and labour. The effect is a qualitative difference in strategies in cop-ing with the physical, the social and the economic environment. The composition of the herds may be influenced by wealth, and this composition is more likely to cause differences in susceptibility to risk and in herd recovery after drought (Grandin 1983).

The production aims of the poor and the rich pas-toralists are often different, with the poor households concentrating much on milk supply, while the rich households often concentrate on both milk and meat production. This often leads to difference in offtake and acquisition patterns. In overall, the possibilities of alternative investing and engagement in extra- survival activities such as trading to generate income are influenced by the wealth of the household.

Pokot livestock resource management

Livestock ownership is an important resource man-agement aspect for the Pokot. Livestock provides milk meat, hides and skins as output functions. They are importantly regarded for their value as assets and a security function, ownership that can be regarded as a saving account that is not affected by monetary inflation, and able to earn interests through off-springs. They are readily convertible into cash or other items with full control of the investor. Socially and culturally, livestock use in ceremonies and pride wealth payment cannot be gainsaid. They are valu-able as mobility assets, being used in transportation of goods.

Often, mixed herds are preferred because of comple-mentary nature of different species in products and demand. There are different management levels, ecological adaptability, disease and drought sensitiv-ity, performance levels, feed requirements, products, and economic as well as social functions.

41


These very important functions of livestock require and depend on the availability and management of natural resources, and determined by the classes of livestock kept and their ability to cope with unpre-dictable conditions. In Pokot pastoral livestock pro-duction, management of aspects such as watering in-tervals, disease treatment, offtake patterns, culling regime and herd structure are crucial areas of con-sideration.

Since the Pokot largely depend on scarce and unpre-dictable natural resources for their income and sur-vival, risk avoidance becomes crucial for them. Large herders therefore tend to direct their livestock management to risk minimization that tends to re-duce productivity. Often, risk management consists of the following: maximization of herd size, mainte-nance of more than one species of livestock and fe-male domination in herd structure. Others include strategic offtake (for example, withholding of live-stock in the good years and selling off stock in bad years), common land use to cope with variability and unreliability, gifting and social networking, resource sharing, borrowing and lending.

There is, however, a limited possibility for the sim-ple Pokot household in making use of these strate-gies because of demands of high labour input, as in maximization of herd size, species diversification, herd mobility and splitting of herds. These require whole community co-operation that forms the very significance of social and cultural bonding.

Since risk avoidance is crucial for the herds’ long-term survival, there is a marked reluctance to adopt changes proposed by government extension services and development agencies. Often, I have been chal-lenged by questions posed by pastoral farmers, such as: “ ‘forty years ago when you started your research and disease surveillances each household had aver-agely about hundreds herds of cows. Now each household have just about fifty. This is research for what?’ ”

Due to harsh environmental conditions, most Pokot herders are forced to earn their living at compara-tively negligible opportunity costs. They employ a number of drought-mitigating tactics when faced with the situation. One of the tactics includes ex-panding the grazing area as it happens during defi-cient rainfall, herd segregation and the reliance on fallback regions. However, there is a marked decline

in fallback regions due to increasing population pressure and land alienation.

Other than communal fields that offer scarce forage zones, there is often restricted entry into grazing zones of neighbouring ethnic communities. Cases of cattle rustling and banditry are rampant, leading to loss of lives and livestock. Availability of pasture in a Pokot livestock production system is limited and unsustainable, given the unpredictably short rainy periods and the large herd size.

In Pokot herding system, cattle production is often subjected to periodic resource scarcity. Resource scarcity is often mitigated by low rainfall that can be treated as an external variable to the production sys-tem. Cattle stocking rate influence the magnitude of average rainfall effect. Stocking rate is an internal system factor that dictates the potential intensity of forage competition among cattle. The higher the stocking rate the greater the risk of negative density-dependent effects on herd.

Conclusion

The Pokot are periodically faced with threats of star-vation, and even as I write this report, most families are solely dependent on government and relief agency food subsidies. Unfortunately, over-depen-dence on food aid compromises the ability to inter-nally mobilise food resources. This should not be seen from the perspective of external food aids, but equally to household and livestock resource and management dynamics.

References cited

Grandin, B.E. 1983 The importance of wealth effects on pastoral

production: a rapid method for wealth rank-ing. In Pastoral Systems Research in sub-Saharan Africa. Addis Ababa: ILCA, pp. 237-254.

Kaufmann, B. 1998 Analysis of Pastoral Camel Husbandry in

Northern Kenya. Weikersheim, Germany. Centre for Agriculture in the Tropics and Subtropics. University of Hohenheim.

McIntire, J. Managing Risk in African Pastoralism. 1991 In D. Holden, P. Hazell and A. Pritchard

(Eds.) Risk in Agriculture. Proceedings of the Tenth Agriculture Sector Symposium, pp.

42


129-142. The World Bank. Washington, D.C.

Republic of Kenya 2002 West Pokot District Development Plan,

2002 – 2008. Nairobi: Government Printer.University of Glasgow

1997 The University and its Communities: The Report 1997/1998. University of Glasgow.

Book Reviews

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health

By Marion Nestle University of California Press, 2003, 457 pps

Reviewed by Joylin NamieUtah Valley State College

Why do we eat what we eat? This seemingly simple question often elicits an extraordinarily complex re-ply among those of us who study food. Eating is about a great many things other than nutrition. Fac-tors as divergent as ethnicity, religion, body image, and economics all figure into what completes the journey from market to mouth. In societies like ours, however, where overabundance is the norm, choice is perhaps the factor most visible to us. Food is everywhere and we, as individuals, are free to pick and choose what we wish from the cornucopia that surrounds us. Who is it, though, who determines the choices we have to choose from? Do we really have as much choice in the matter as we think we do? In Food Politics, Dr. Marion Nestle argues that it is the food industry that not only determines our food sup-ply, but negatively influences our diet and health in ways oftentimes invisible to the average consumer.

An authority in the area of nutrition and food policy, Dr. Nestle has been intimately involved with the food industry for decades. Her experience gives her an edge, while her current position as an academic nutritionist allows her the freedom to say what she pleases about those she takes to task. The result is a compelling critique of food company practices that dominate much of what we are told about nutrition, as well as many of the products we have to choose from in assembling a healthy diet. Taken together, the fifteen clearly written and well-researched chap-ters tell the tale of an industry bent on making a profit at the expense of consumer health.

Nestle begins by outlining the history of food advice in the US, in particular the transition from prevent-ing diseases of deficiency (“eat more”) to the current focus on overnutrition and obesity (“eat less”). The carefully chronicled debacle of the creation of the Food Guide Pyramid highlights the power of food lobbyists over federal guidelines. It also throws into stark relief the dual role played by the USDA, an agency with conflicting mandates to protect agricul-ture (i.e., kow tow to the meat and dairy industries) and to advise the public about diet and health.

Part Two explains how food companies are able to exert a disproportionate influence over government nutrition policy, a scenario with which Nestle is inti-mately familiar as editor of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health (1988). Tactics used by the food industry include lobbying and campaign contributions to members of government associated with food regulations. How these methods influence policy is aptly illustrated through discussions of the “Banana Wars” involving Chiquita and the EU, and sugarcane production in environmentally sensitive areas of the American south. Nestle also exposes the ways in which the food industry co-opts profes-sionals in the fields of nutrition and food research. She questions the ethics (including her own) of aca-demic and professional integrity when food compa-nies help defray the costs of producing academic journals, underwrite professional conferences, spon-sor research, and even “purchase” entire academic departments. This section concludes with several in-sightful case studies illustrating the ways these fac-tors combine to affect what we eat. Nestle uses well known examples to illustrate her arguments, includ-ing the boycott of Nestlé over infant formula and bottle feeding in developing countries, as well as the (in)famous London “McLibel” case and the suing of Oprah Winfrey by Texas cattlemen over the poten-tial for Mad Cow Disease in America--lawsuits used by the food industry to quell potential debates about unsavory and unsafe food practices.

Part Three chronicles advertising efforts aimed at children and the inundation of schools with a flood of “junk” food and sugary soft drinks, the former a target Eric Schlosser tackled with equal ferocity and added historical depth in Fast Food Nation. Part Four closes the case study portion of the book with chapters devoted to tracing the deregulation of di-etary supplements and the consequences of this for public health. This area of the food industry is

43


unique in that, due to the efforts of supplement man-ufacturers, the public is left largely to itself to deci-pher information regarding the safety and effective-ness of herbal and botanical agents. Unfortunately, our perception of these products as helpful or harm-ful depends more often on our own beliefs rather than scientific proof of efficacy, a perilous situation well illustrated by Nestle’s chronicle of the ephedra tragedy.

Discussion of food industry practices closes with three chapters devoted to the engineering of “func-tional” or “designer” foods. Most illustrative is the chapter describing the thirty year saga of Proctor & Gamble’s Olestra©, categorized by Nestle as the “ultimate techno-food”, sucrose polyester. One omission in an otherwise insightful discussion is at what point such feats of food engineering stop being foods at all. If something added to something else prevents the combination from being digested, is the end product still a food? The fact that the very in-dustry charged with supplying our food spends an inordinate amount of money and effort creating non-foods, and on discouraging us from eating real ones, brings us back to the central concern of this book: the influence of the food industry on our nutrition and health.

In the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, Nestle exposes the dark side of food. A life-giving substance, food can kill us, and Nestle never loses sight of the seriousness of this is-sue throughout the text. Our very health and well being is at stake. An overabundance of food, cou-pled with the clandestine efforts of food producers to encourage us to eat more, not less, is not only dis-turbing, but dangerous. Nestle emphasizes, how-ever, that we can take action on our own behalf. Taking her cue in part from national anti-smoking efforts, she closes with strategies for countering the efforts of the food industry to destroy our health. In doing so she renders this book a guide for living, rather than simply a tool for teaching.

Eat well. Feed your mind. Read this book.

References CitedDHHS 1988 The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. Washington, DC.Pollan, Michael 2002 Power Steer. New York Times Magazine. Sunday, March 31, p. 44.

Pollan, Michael. 2001 The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York, NY: Random House.Schlosser, Eric 2001 Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-

American Meal. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.Sinclair, Upton 1906 The Jungle. New York, NY: Doubleday, Page.

Household Decisions, Gender, and Development; A Synthesis of Recent Research.

Agnes R. Quisumbing, Editor.International Publisher: Baltimore:

Food Policy Research Institute Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004

ISBN: 0896297179 - Paperback

Reviewed by Miriam S. ChaikenIndiana University of Pennsylvania

This edited volume represents a compendium of re-cent research projects undertaken by the Interna-tional Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), one of the important institutions in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The editor of the volume and the majority of con-tributing authors of the 33 chapters are economists and members of the IFPRI staff, which is the key to understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of the volume. In terms of strengths, the volume deals with a diverse array of issues that have been at the forefront of investigations of food security and gen-der: intrahousehold resource allocation, agricultural policy, health and nutrition, social capital, and the effectiveness of intervention strategies. The book provides policy implications in a way that is accessi-ble to development economists, many of whom have previously failed to heed the call for more cog-nizance of the role of gender in determining out-comes of economic policies and programs. The main premise of the research summarized in this book is that the household does not act as a uniform and monolithic economic unit, and that within house-holds there may be significant variation in goals, re-sources, and allocation decisions of the various stakeholders, with gender differences at the founda-

44


tion of this variation. If this awareness becomes in-ternalized in the work of economists, then this book will have made a valuable contribution.

Another strength of the book is a reflection of the importance of IFPRI in influencing food and agricul-tural policy worldwide. As a key organization within the CGIAR network, and one that has policy-related research programs integrated into the commodity-oriented research centers (e.g. the International Rice Research Institute) it is important to be aware of the priorities in their research agendas, and the conclu-sions reached from IFPRI research. The articles are generally short and pithy, and each section of the book opens with a overview article that summarizes the major findings of the chapters and identifies the “key messages” that are the result. In addition, a CD is included with the book that includes more com-prehensive reports and papers from IFPRI to permit more in-depth analysis of recent research.

Among the most interesting and useful articles are those that have clear implications for food, agricul-ture, and nutrition policy. Among the strongest are Maluccio, Haddad and May’s analysis of the ramifi-cations of increasing female labor migration on child welfare in South Africa; Bouis, Bhargava, and Scrimshaw’s comparison of different strategies to address chronic iron shortage and anemia in women; Smith et al.’s analysis of differentials in women’s status and child nutrition, and Ahmed and del Ninno’s article on food distributions and participa-tion in formal education in Bangladesh. All of the articles confirm the long-held assumption that when resources are managed by women, or women’s re-sources improve, the welfare of their children im-proves as well. These articles confirm the need to target women directly as participants in development programs, as the multiplier benefits are far more sig-nificant than when men are the sole beneficiaries.

The weaknesses of the volume are likely to be more keenly noted by anthropologists, as the “revelations” that the authors describe are insights that have been articulated by cultural anthropologists for three decades. For us, this is old wine in a new and slightly more quantified bottle. For example, Polly Hill’s seminal work Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for a Prosecution (1986) noted the fallacy of dealing with households as a uniform statistical unit, and the problems stem-ming from the failure to recognize the significant economic contributions of women in rural communi-

ties. The economists in this volume argue that the qualitative data (such as that is more commonly pre-sented by anthropologists) is not sufficient to nullify the unitary economic model, and they assume that the highly quantitative data that they supply has greater validity in making this case. As an anthropol-ogist I find this a simplistic argument, both because few of us would argue that quantitative data is nec-essarily more “real” than qualitative data, and be-cause these authors fail to recognize that much of the work conducted by anthropologists is indeed quite quantitative in its approach, most notably the rigor-ous studies of time and labor allocation that present a precise picture of the gender-based differences in labor allocation.

Another drawback of the volume is the somewhat incestuous nature of IFPRI literature reviews. To the extent that these studies ground their work in the lit-erature on economic development, they largely cite each other and previous IFPRI research, whether published as gray literature by IFPRI, or published articles by IFPRI staff. A few important works are acknowledged, such as Eleanor Fapohunda’s work on “nonpooling” households and Spring’s edited volume on women farmers and commercial ven-tures, but these are relatively few in comparison to IFPRI works.

The book is one that would be valuable in the library holdings for any university, and might be suitable for graduate courses in economic development. The audience most likely to benefit from the research that is summarized in the book are other develop-ment professionals working in food, agriculture, and nutrition policy who may be able to take these find-ings and translate them into more effective, nuanced, and culturally-sensitive policy.

Why Some Like it Hot: Food, Genes,and Cultural Diversity

By Gary Paul Nabhan. 2004. Washington, DC: Island Press. ISBN: 1559634669 Hardcover.

Reviewed by Miriam S. ChaikenIndiana University of Pennsylvania

Famed ecology writer Gary Paul Nabhan has pro-duced another fine book that makes many intriguing issues in nutritional anthropology accessible to a

45


general audience. Much in the same genre as Oliver Sach’s books, Nabhan weaves tales of travel, ethnic-ity, agriculture, genetics, and food into a readable explanation of why seemingly perplexing food pat-terns persist. His central premise, “we are what our ancestors drank and ate (p. 30)” is explored in a number of both famous and obscure cases in nutri-tional anthropology – such as the link between fava bean consumption and malaria resistance, the effects of the Mediterranean Diet, supertasters and chilis, and the predisposition towards Type II. Diabetes common in many ethnic groups.

Nabhan focuses on relatively recent genetic history to find clues as to why our food patterns and physio-logical responses exist – and he critiques models that promote the notion that our ideal food patterns are a product of our more ancient paleolithic history. One chapter is devoted to debunking the notion that “Java Man”, mitochondrial Eve, and other icons of the past were consuming the same magic dietary for-mula that would ensure health in contemporary pop-ulations. While he acknowledges that ancient diets almost surely consisted of higher intake of lean ani-mal protein, much higher intake of diverse plant foods that contained healthful properties, much more fiber, and relatively little salt, grain, and no dairy or fermented food products (alcohol, vinegar), he be-lieves the dietary patterns of ancient peoples were more diverse and varied significantly as a conse-quence of local ecological conditions.

Nabhan then turns to several important case studies to illustrate the ways in which relatively recent hu-man history shape food preferences and tolerances. His first case example involves the famous link be-tween malaria resistance and fava sensitivity in some Mediterranean males. He is able to engage the reader as though unraveling a mystery, while simultane-ously recounting the history of the research that ex-plained the favismo pattern, local perceptions of the problem, and the global distribution of malaria. The beauty of Nabhan’s book is well illustrated in this chapter, he takes a complex scientific problem, loaded with information from genetics, ethnobotany, medicine, and cultural history, and makes it com-pelling for a lay person – which is why I think this book is an ideal addition to the materials we may use for teaching undergraduate courses in nutritional an-thropology.

Additional chapters examine other intriguing case examples, such as the adaptation of Cretans to a diet

extraordinarily high in fat from olive oil, while en-joying very low incidence of coronary heart disease; the ways in which potentially toxic foods are ren-dered palatable by cultural innovations; and the rea-sons why some people are chili and spice lovers and why others are spice-averse.

His final chapter concludes with ways in which the lessons about our recent past and dietary adaptations can be applied to addressing contemporary prob-lems. He focuses on the extremely high frequency of obesity and its related problems among indigenous Hawaiians, and how the unique Waianae Program helped address their problems by retuning to their culinary roots. He argues that by returning to the cuisine of their ancestors, many of the Hawaiian par-ticipants not only regained their health, but also re-gained a cultural grounding and thus facilitated a cultural renaissance.

Although the book does not shrink from incorporat-ing fairly technical material from scientific research, its one flaw may be in an oversimplification or ro-manticizing of the underlying theme – that we can all be healthier and happier if we return to our culi-nary pasts. While few would dispute the value of eating down on the food chain or having a diet rich in diverse, non-processed foods, the average Ameri-can is not in a position to fully embrace the tradi-tional diet of their ancestors. Indeed, given the plu-ralism that is one of the hallmarks of our culture, the average “Heinz 57” American might wonder which of his ancestral food traditions should he follow – those of the Irish peasant who was his great grandfa-ther, the Cherokee who reportedly appeared on the family lineage a few generations back, the Italian maternal grandmother, or the Slavic paternal grand-father? Similarly, many “traditional” food practices may not be patterns to emulate, as many traditional agrarian peoples have long-established food prac-tices that are products of centuries of poverty and food scarcity. Just as food patterns, changes in pro-duction systems, medical innovations, and diffusion of cultural traditions have all affected contemporary consumption patterns, so too have patterns of migra-tion, intermarriage, and cultural contact.

Overall Nabhan’s book combines perspectives from nutritional anthropology, genetics, ethnobotany, and archaeology to illustrate complex patterns of coevo-lution and the underlying logic of food patterns in a readable and accessible format. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about what

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it is than nutritional anthropologists do, and for use in undergraduate teaching in a variety of different courses.

President’s Column

Miriam S. ChaikenIndiana University of Pennsylvania

I find myself in the unusual position of writing my first column as President of the Society for the An-thropology of Food and Nutrition, knowing that it is also my last column. As we have publicized through other avenues, the current incarnation of Nutritional Anthropology as a peer-reviewed print publication will cease to exist with this issue. The decision to stop hard copy editions was a difficult one, and the reasons for this decision very complex, perhaps it is best to say it is just the right time to think about new ways of doing business. Our members can look for-ward to seeing a new web based publication portal for SAFN that will offer greater flexibility and op-portunity for diverse types of media, and we have re-cently instituted a list-serve that provides rapid com-munication with all subscribers in a fashion that is impossible with conventional publications.

We have a number of things to celebrate, as we look forward to the future of our organization, and ac-knowledging the 30th birthday of SAFN is a good place to start. We have been a small, but very dy-namic unit of the AAA, with long-standing, loyal members who are engaged in cutting-edge scholar-ship in food and nutrition issues. One of our greatest strengths is the diverse talents of our members, per-haps more than any other AAA unit, we have partic-ipation from the entire range of the discipline. Our members come from all four traditional subdisci-plines, we encompass traditional scholars and ap-plied practitioners, and we range in our theoretical approaches from highly quantified and materialist to very interpretative and ethnographic. This is the essence of the holism of anthropology, and we are proud to carry on that tradition.

In recent years we have come to play an important role in the AAA, as our sessions at the meetings have robust attendance, our members have served in key leadership positions (notably our new AAA President Alan Goodman), and we have instituted the annual keynote address that has become a very

valued activity at the annual meetings. We have found a way to mentor young scholars, through the annual Christine Wilson Award competition, and to maintain this living legacy to the late Christine, who did so much to make nutritional anthropology what it is today.

In reflecting on our past, we must also look to the future, and the role that we will play in shaping that future, both as an organization, and as individuals. We are uniquely qualified to examine some of the most significant issues in contemporary society: how do we improve food security for the third of the world’s population who lack adequate food to thrive? How can we influence public policy in en-suring the safety of foods, the appropriate integra-tion of new food and agricultural technologies, and in combating degenerative diseases associated with nutritional surfeit? How do we celebrate and main-tain cultural traditions that are often expressed through traditional foodways in an increasingly plu-ralistic, mechanized world? What forces have shaped the evolution of the human species, and how does that evolutionary legacy influence our future health and wellbeing? What role does globalization play in food related research and policy, and how do we respond to the impacts of globalization? These are all, indeed, important issues, and formidable challenges to our profession. It may be my tendency to be a glass more than half-full person, but I think we are uniquely qualified to play a significant role in addressing these questions, and shaping scholarship and policy in these key areas. Despite the change in our publication outlet, we will continue to be strong and effective players in the sphere of food and nutri-tion research.

Copyright 2001 American Anthropological Associ-ation

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